Writing - Sam Harrelson

What We Notice, What We Owe: A Black Walnut at UU Lake Norman

Yesterday afternoon I drove up to Davidson, North Carolina, to speak at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Lake Norman.

The meditation was called “What We Notice, What We Owe.”

The question I had sent ahead was fairly straightforward:

What might paying close attention to a tree teach us about how we live with one another and with the more-than-human world?

The answer has become considerably less straightforward.

For the past several months, I’ve been sitting most mornings with the black walnut tree behind our house in Spartanburg. The practice began as a way of putting some of my doctoral work under pressure outside the reading chair. If I’m going to write about ecological intentionality, creaturely encounter, empathy, perception, and the limits of what one living being can know of another, then I need some place where those ideas can encounter something other than another book.

The walnut has been very good at that.

Again and again, the practice has shown me how quickly attention becomes interpretation. A branch moves, and I call it reaching. A walnut falls, and I call it a gift. A fungal branch comes down in a storm, and within a few sentences I’ve written an entire metaphysics for the tree.

One of the phrases that has emerged from the field notes is:

Availability is not invitation.

Something being present to me, accessible to me, or even useful to me does not mean that it exists for me.

That distinction became the center of yesterday’s meditation.

I brought Edith Stein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty along, although lightly. Stein helps me think about the strange combination of presence and remainder in our encounter with another. Another being can really be given to me without being given as my own experience is. Merleau-Ponty helps unsettle the fantasy that I ever stand outside the world looking at it from nowhere. I am already embodied, situated, implicated, and seeing from somewhere.

But I’ve become increasingly convinced that the philosophical vocabulary works best in public when it follows the encounter rather than preceding it.

Begin with the walnut.

Then ask what has happened to our seeing.

That doesn’t prove ecological intentionality as a philosophical argument, and I don’t want to confuse a warm reception with philosophical warrant. But yesterday did show me something important about how this work can travel outside an academic setting.

People understood the problem because they already know what it is like to encounter something that exceeds their first description of it.

The Lake Norman setting gave us another way into that question.

We call it Lake Norman, but before it was Lake Norman it was the Catawba River. Cowans Ford Dam changed that landscape and created the reservoir in the twentieth century. Roads, home sites, crossings, histories, habitats, and older relationships with the land and water now sit beneath or around what appears at first glance to be simply “the lake.”

The congregation’s own land acknowledgment also names the much older presence of the Catawba and other Indigenous peoples in this region.

So the watershed itself became part of the argument.

A place can be many real things at once: drinking water, electricity, habitat, recreation, property, ancestral landscape, memory, river.

No single description exhausts it.

That is increasingly where my thinking about ecological intentionality is going. Better attention does not necessarily produce mastery. Sometimes better attention makes the inadequacy of mastery more obvious.

And then comes the harder question.

What does that ask of us?

Attention alone is not an ethic. Advertisers pay attention. Surveillance systems pay attention. Extraction industries can study forests, rivers, animals, and people with astonishing care.

The issue is what kind of attention we practice. Is it an attention that makes the world increasingly available to us? Or can attention also make us more available to correction, interruption, and change?

That question became the hinge of the meditation.

Afterward, the congregation has a practice they call “Talk Back,” and that may have been my favorite part of the afternoon. The sermon ended, but the conversation didn’t. We spent a good while talking about trees, forests, mycorrhizal networks, watersheds, attention, and what relationships among organisms might mean.

It was wonderfully nerdy. More importantly, it became communal.

Something that begins most mornings with one person sitting quietly beneath one walnut tree in Spartanburg had moved into a room full of people in Davidson, where they began adding their own trees, experiences, questions, and knowledge to it.

That meant a great deal to me.

I’ve been writing for some time that ecological intentionality should not become another way of making the more-than-human world say whatever we already wanted it to say. Yesterday reminded me of the other side of that claim. Restraint does not have to end in silence.

We can acknowledge that another life exceeds what we know of it and still remain in relationship.

We can act without pretending to possess complete knowledge. We can care while remaining corrigible. And perhaps attention becomes spiritual practice at exactly that point.

Earlier in this work I wrote a line that continues to follow me:

First, the seeing, then the keeping.

I’m less certain now about what either word means than I was when I first wrote it.

That seems like progress.

The recording of yesterday’s service is below, followed by the text of the meditation.

I’m deeply grateful to the folks at UU Lake Norman for the invitation, their hospitality, and especially the conversation afterward.

What We Notice, What We Owe

Thank you for having me here this afternoon.

I’ve been looking forward to being with you all, and I realized while looking through some of your recent services that I seem to have arrived in the middle of a conversation.

A couple of weeks ago, you were thinking about circles of concern. Last week, you were thinking about focus and attention.

So apparently my assignment today is to come in and make things more complicated.

Which, as a PhD student, I feel uniquely qualified to do.

But I do want to stay with that question of attention, because for the past several months I’ve been engaged in a practice that has become much more important to me than I expected.

There is a black walnut tree behind our house in Spartanburg.

And most mornings, I go outside and sit with it.

That’s about it.

I take a chair. I sit for twenty or thirty minutes. I usually take a photograph. I notice what’s happening. Then I record some reflections afterward.

I began doing this partly because of my doctoral research. I study ecology, spirituality, religion, and phenomenology, which is a philosophical tradition concerned, among other things, with how things actually appear to us in experience.

I’ve been developing an idea I call “ecological intentionality,” and sitting with one particular tree seemed like a reasonable way of testing some of the things I was thinking about.

And the strange thing is that the longer I’ve done it, the less certain I’ve become.

I mean that in a good way.

At first, it’s easy to sit beneath a tree and start interpreting.

This branch reaches toward the light.

This walnut has fallen to the ground.

This limb resisted the storm.

The tree is giving.

The tree is communicating.

The tree is teaching me.

Maybe some of those ways of speaking have value. But after sitting there day after day, I began to notice how quickly I moved from what I was actually seeing to what I wanted the tree to mean.

I could see a branch moving in the wind. I could not necessarily say that the tree was “reaching.”

I could see walnuts on the ground. I could not say that the tree had “given” them to me.

One morning I noticed fungal bodies growing from a branch that was still attached to the tree. Several days later, after storms had come through, that same branch was lying on the ground.

Those things I could say.

But the temptation was immediately to tell a story about them. The tree rejected the branch. The fungus killed it. The storm liberated it. The branch had somehow become available for me to take.

And suddenly my twenty minutes of careful observation had become a very elaborate autobiography.

The tree had developed exactly the philosophy that Sam needed it to have that morning.

That should probably make us suspicious.

So one of the sentences I’ve written in my field notes lately is this:

“Availability is not invitation.”

Just because something is available to me does not mean it exists for me.

And that has become one of the most important lessons of this practice.

The closer I look, the more present the tree becomes. But in some ways, the more mysterious it becomes too.

I know more, and I become more aware of what I don’t know.

That tension is at the heart of what I’ve been working on.

One of the philosophers important to my research is Edith Stein. She spent a great deal of time thinking about empathy and about what it means to encounter another being.

Her basic insight, put much more plainly than she puts it, is that another person really is present to me, but the other person’s experience is never given to me in exactly the same way that my own experience is.

I can encounter you. I can know you. I can love you. But I can never fully possess your experience from the inside.

Another philosopher important to me, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, reminds us that we never stand outside the world looking down upon it from nowhere.

We are bodies. We see from somewhere. We carry histories, habits, assumptions, abilities, wounds, hopes, and expectations into everything we encounter.

There is no view from above where I finally see everything exactly as it is.

And I find that both humbling and liberating.

Because it means the goal of attention is not mastery.

The goal might be to learn how to remain in relationship with something that exceeds my understanding.

And that brings me to the title of this talk.

“What We Notice, What We Owe.”

Because attention by itself doesn’t make us ethical.

People can pay extraordinary attention in order to exploit something. Advertisers pay attention. Surveillance systems pay attention. Industries can study forests, rivers, animals, and human communities with incredible care in order to extract more efficiently from them.

So “pay attention” isn’t enough.

The real question is:

What kind of attention are we practicing?

Is it an attention that merely makes the world more available to us, or one that leaves us open to being interrupted, corrected, and changed by what we encounter?

That, I think, is where attention begins to become an ethical and even a spiritual practice.

And here in Lake Norman, you have an extraordinary example of how complicated this can become.

We call this place Lake Norman.

And of course it is a lake.

But before it was Lake Norman, it was the Catawba River.

Beginning in 1959, Cowans Ford Dam was built across the Catawba. Water rose behind it, eventually covering more than 32,000 acres.

Roads disappeared beneath the water.

Home sites disappeared.

Old crossings disappeared.

A river became a reservoir.

And today that water is many things at once: electricity, drinking water, habitat, recreation, waterfront property, economic development, memory.

And it is still water moving through the Catawba watershed.

None of those descriptions is necessarily false.

But none of them exhausts the place.

I also noticed that your own materials acknowledge that this region carries histories far older than the name Lake Norman, including the histories of the Catawba and other Indigenous peoples who have lived in relationship with these lands and waters.

An acknowledgment like that matters when it complicates our seeing.

It reminds us that the landscape in front of us is never only the landscape we happen to see today.

Places carry histories. Watersheds carry histories. Communities carry histories.

Attention can teach us to notice what our first glance leaves in the background.

This is one reason I appreciate the Unitarian Universalist language of an interdependent world.

But interdependence doesn’t mean harmony.

Trees compete for light. Animals eat other animals. Storms break branches. Human goods conflict with one another and with the goods of other creatures.

The same lake can be drinking water, habitat, recreation, power generation, ancestral landscape, and valuable real estate.

Those goods do not always line up neatly.

So recognizing interdependence doesn’t solve our ethical problems.

Sometimes it reveals how difficult they actually are.

One shared world does not mean one obvious good.

And that means attention must eventually become responsibility.

Not because careful observation magically tells us what to do, but because once we begin to see relationships that we had ignored, we can no longer pretend they aren’t there.

That’s true ecologically.

And I think it’s true of our human relationships too.

There are people whom our society has learned not to notice, histories we have been trained not to see, and neighbors we turn into categories long before we encounter them as people.

Attention cannot solve all of that.

But perhaps it can interrupt one of the habits that makes injustice possible: the belief that what we have noticed about another person is all there is to know.

The philosopher in me wants to say that no other being is exhausted by my perception of them.

The minister in me wants to say that this sounds a lot like humility.

And the person sitting under a walnut tree every morning is learning that humility does not mean doing nothing.

That matters because we can turn uncertainty into an excuse.

“I don’t fully understand this ecosystem, so I can’t act.”

“I don’t fully understand another person’s experience, so I have no responsibility.”

But we never get complete knowledge.

We act anyway.

The question is whether our action remains open to correction.

Can we care without pretending to possess? Can we make commitments while remaining willing to be changed by what we encounter next?

My own Christian tradition has something to contribute here.

One of the things Jesus says is, “Consider the lilies.”

And I love that word: consider.

Look.

Attend.

Before the explanation, before the doctrine, before the conclusion, there is an invitation to notice something alive that was already there.

My tradition hasn’t always been especially good at that.

Christians have sometimes been much better at explaining what creation means than at paying attention to what creation is doing.

We’ve been good at turning the world into symbol.

Less good, sometimes, at allowing the world to remain a world.

And perhaps that’s why this little practice with the walnut has mattered so much to me.

It keeps putting me back in my chair.

Back in this body.

Back in this particular place.

Back before the temptation to make the world mean what I need it to mean.

In an earlier piece of my research, I wrote a phrase that has stayed with me:

First, the seeing, then the keeping.

I’m less certain now about what “seeing” means than I was when I wrote it.

And I’m probably less certain about “keeping” too.

But I still think the order matters.

First, learn to attend.

Then ask what care requires.

Maybe keeping doesn’t mean possessing.

Maybe keeping means tending, protecting, remaining faithful to a relationship.

Learning enough about a place that its destruction can no longer be abstract.

Learning enough about another person that their suffering cannot remain a category.

Learning enough about the tree outside your window that it ceases to be scenery.

And perhaps that is where what we notice begins to shape what we owe.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll probably sit beneath that walnut tree again.

I don’t expect it to tell me what to do.

I’ll sit.

I’ll look.

I’ll listen.

I’ll probably misunderstand something.

Hopefully I’ll notice enough to correct some of the misunderstanding.

And then I’ll try to carry that practice into the rest of the day.

Because the tree is not asking me to become a tree.

The Catawba is not asking us to become water.

Our neighbors are not asking us to fully possess their experience before we care for them.

Maybe what is being asked of us is harder and more ordinary than that:

To be present.

To pay attention.

To remain teachable.

And then, with all the incomplete knowledge we have, to act with care.

First, the seeing.

Then, the keeping.

What we notice.

And what we owe.

Thank you.

After the Talk

The formal meditation ended there, but the conversation afterward is part of what I want to remember.

I had asked two questions for the congregation’s Talk Back:

What is something you’ve learned to notice differently because you stayed with it long enough?

And has that change in attention ever changed what you felt responsible for?

From there we wandered, happily, into trees and fungal networks and watersheds and the complicated ways living systems are connected.

That seems appropriate.

The project began, after all, with a very small act.

Go outside.

Sit down.

Stay long enough to notice that the tree is not what you first thought it was.

Then stay a little longer.

I’m increasingly convinced that there’s a great deal of philosophical, ecological, and spiritual work contained in that practice.

And tomorrow morning, I’ll go sit beneath the walnut again.

The Trees are Sick

We’re even seeing the effects of this here in South Carolina, with our ash trees that have been decimated. It’s incredibly sad to think about how forests in North America have undergone so much transition already because of human effects, from farming and development to unintended consequences of our capitalist culture. I do worry about what forests might look like in the coming decades if we don’t intentionally think about our own actions and figure out a way (besides just using pesticides) to address these issues.

The Overlapping Plagues Quietly Devastating American Forests – The New York Times:

The trees are sick.

Epidemics are escalating, across numerous species, as more and more pests and pathogens invade forests. Their entryway is global trade — in live plants, and in the countless products that are shipped in wooden pallets, crates and other packaging. As trade has boomed, so have the opportunities for tiny stowaways to wreak havoc.

Open Sourcing My Work

I spent part of today doing what I tend to do when I’m supposed to be reading Merleau-Ponty… tinkering with the machinery around the reading.

What started as an idea to build my own Obsidian theme turned into Understory, a warm, quiet theme for long-form reading, research, field notes, and writing. It grew out of the visual language I’ve been using for the Black Walnut Field Notes: parchment, walnut, moss, autumn colors, serif typography, and an interface that tries to stay underneath the work rather than becoming the work. I’ve published it on GitHub under an open-source license in case anyone else finds it useful.

That experiment naturally led to something I’ve wanted to do for a while: create a public GitHub repository for my research on ecological intentionality.

I’ve been publishing the curated field notes themselves at ecologicalintentionality.org, but GitHub gives me a different kind of public space. The website is primarily a place to read the field practice. The repository is a place to see the research changing over time: field notes, concepts, methodological documents, sources, links among thinkers and questions, and the revision history that comes with trying to make an argument while remaining willing to change it.

I’m increasingly interested in public scholarship that shows some of the process rather than presenting every idea as though it arrived fully formed. That doesn’t mean putting my entire private research environment online. My Obsidian vault still contains the messy laboratory: transcripts, private field notes, unfinished arguments, family notes, reading notes, and plenty of things that turn out to be wrong. The GitHub repository sits downstream from an intentional public boundary. Material enters it only after I’ve decided that it belongs in the public research record.

That distinction has become part of the method for me. Research involves choices about what we see, what we claim, what evidence warrants those claims, and when something is ready to become public. GitHub gives me a way to preserve that history of revision and connection without pretending that scholarship is ever really finished.

There’s also something fitting about doing this while working on ecological intentionality. The project keeps returning to questions of relation, difference, attention, and accountability. Making some of the research process visible feels like another way of practicing those questions rather than only writing about them.

So, as of today, there are two new little public spaces in the ecosystem:

Ecological Intentionality: Public Research Layer

Understory: An Obsidian Theme

Both are works in progress. That’s rather the point, I think 🙂

Between 0 and 1: Updating the CV

I updated my Curriculum Vitae page here this morning. That sounds like an administrative sentence (and in one sense it is). A CV is supposed to be a fairly boring document: education, publications, presentations, teaching, service, and whatever else can be fit under a recognizable academic heading.

But looking at the new version, I realized that it also records something that has been harder for me to see while I’m actually living through it.

Over the last few months, a number of threads that I’ve been working through for years have started to come together in a more coherent way. My first comprehensive examination at CIIS became a paper on ecological intentionality, creaturely form, and what I’m calling the Ecology of the Cross. That work brought Edith Stein, phenomenology, metaphysics, and ecological perception into a conversation that I’m still learning how to describe. The second comprehensive exam is now pushing that further through Stein’s account of non-primordiality and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s later work on flesh, chiasm, écart, and the shared perceptual field.

Those terms can sound fairly abstract when collected in a paragraph like that. One of the most important developments this fall has been finding a way to put them under pressure outside the reading chair.

That’s where the Ecological Intentionality Field Notes have come in. Most mornings, I sit for a while with the black walnut tree behind our house in Spartanburg. I take a photograph, listen, watch, write, and then return to whatever questions have emerged from the reading. Sometimes Husserl survives the encounter. Sometimes Stein does. Sometimes a storm comes through, drops a branch, and reminds me that my carefully constructed language about gift, relation, and reciprocity may have gotten ahead of the tree.

The practice has become one of the most important parts of the current research. It has forced me to ask whether seeing another creature more attentively actually leads to adequate care, whether belonging can be constitutive without making relation itself the organism’s norm, and whether a shared ecological field can hold genuinely different and sometimes conflicting creaturely goods. Those questions feel much closer to the dissertation I hope to write than I could have imagined even a few months ago.

The updated CV also makes something else more visible to me. The academic work isn’t happening apart from the rest of my life. Teaching Scripture and theology, preaching, working with churches, writing about water and development in the Carolinas, teaching science, studying ancient art, and spending twenty minutes in a folding chair under a walnut tree have started to look less like unrelated chapters and more like parts of the same long inquiry.

I’m hesitant to make that sound tidier than it is. Most days it still feels a little like Zeno’s paradox. There’s some imagined point between 0 and 1 called “becoming a scholar,” and every time I cover half the remaining distance, another half appears. Finish coursework, begin comps. Finish one comprehensive exam, begin another. Clarify ecological intentionality, discover three new problems hidden inside it. Learn to see the walnut differently, then realize that better apprehension isn’t yet adequate care.

Maybe that’s not a problem to solve.

A CV inevitably makes a life look more linear than it actually is. Dates line up on the left. Titles sit neatly beneath headings. Research projects appear to have clear beginnings. But the actual work is messier, more recursive, and more dependent on people, places, books, classrooms, churches, trees, conversations, and accidents than the document can show.

Still, I’m glad to have this particular snapshot.

The updated CV feels closer to the work I’m actually doing now than the version I had posted only a couple of months ago. It doesn’t mean I’ve crossed some invisible line between 0 and 1. I’m increasingly suspicious that there is such a line.

But I can look back from here and see that some distance has been traveled.

And then, tomorrow morning, I’ll go sit under the walnut again.

Sermon: The Days of a Tree – Labor Not in Vain

Honea Path, resurrection, and the work whose meaning exceeds visible success

Yesterday afternoon, a remarkable thunderstorm moved across Spartanburg as we gathered for the UCC Progressive Christian service at the Unitarian Universalist Church. Rain fell hard enough to make driving difficult, while thunder rolled over the sanctuary, and lightning kept plenty of sensible people at home. The congregation in the room was small. Another, more sizable congregation gathered through the livestream.

In a strange way, the weather belonged to the service. We had come to speak about labor and Sabbath, land and water, and what it means to trust that work given to the life of the world is never finally empty. Outside, water moved over roofs, parking lots, red clay, and roots. Inside, the call to worship named rest as both gift and justice: belonging, renewal, fair wages, and Sabbaths that everyone deserves.

September 6 also marked the ninety-second anniversary of the Chiquola Mill massacre at Honea Path. On that morning in 1934, seven striking textile workers were killed while seeking better wages and hours, union recognition, and relief from the “stretch-out” that forced fewer people to tend faster machinery. When local churches would not open their doors for the funerals, around ten thousand people gathered in a field.

That history became the difficult center of the meditation. Paul’s assurance that “in the Lord your labor is not in vain” can become another pious instruction to keep working, especially when it is separated from the resurrection argument that precedes it. Honea Path will not permit that easy reading. What can Paul’s words mean when the workers were killed, the strike was broken, the union disappeared, and the churches refused to make room?

Isaiah 65 gave us another way of imagining the promise. The prophet describes renewed creation through houses people are allowed to inhabit, vineyards whose planters eat the fruit, and lives that endure “like the days of a tree.” Justice appears as the closing of the distance between our hands and our bread. Paul places that creaturely hope within resurrection. Resurrection keeps the losses honest while refusing to grant violence, exploitation, or death authority over the final meaning of a life.

The service moved from a call to Sabbath through Psalm 90, Isaiah 65, and 1 Corinthians 15; from “God of Grace and God of Glory” and “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come” to “Come, Labor On”; from the sermon to an open table and finally Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” (one of my favs that has found its way into a good many services with my sermons over the last decade). That final song carried us out with longing instead of easy triumph.

The full service is below, beginning at the point linked in the video (though I encourage you to watch all of it, as the music and Merianna’s meditations are incredible. The prepared meditation text follows.

The Days of a Tree

“Labor Not in Vain”
UCC Progressive Christian Service · Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg
September 6, 2026

Isaiah 65:17–25 · 1 Corinthians 15:51–58

Six miles east of here, Lawson’s Fork drops over the old dam at Glendale and runs on toward the Pacolet. Brick towers and smokestacks remain from the cotton mill begun there in the 1830s. The machinery stopped in 1961, and a fire took most of the building in 2004. Now hardwood roots work down among bricks laid by human hands.

Before we say anything about labor that is not in vain, I want us to stand somewhere specific, on a particular morning, with particular people.

About an hour southwest of Glendale, the Chiquola Mill stood at the center of Honea Path. On September 6, 1934, ninety-two years ago today, roughly three hundred workers gathered outside its gate. They were part of the largest textile strike in American history, seeking better wages and hours, union recognition, and relief from the “stretch-out,” which required fewer people to tend faster machinery.

The mill superintendent was Dan Beacham. He was also the mayor and exercised the authority of a local magistrate. The mill, the town, and the law had gathered into the hands of one man.

When the governor declined Beacham’s request for the National Guard, more than a hundred local men and anti-union mill workers were deputized and armed. A First World War machine gun was placed on the mill roof. When a scuffle broke out at the gate, gunfire came from the mill. The machine gun jammed, yet the rifles did not.

Six workers died that day. A seventh died from his wounds soon afterward. Most were shot from behind as they fled. Around thirty more people were wounded, including women. Eleven strikebreakers were charged with murder. No one was convicted.

Workers who supported the strike were fired and evicted from company houses. The strike ended with few tangible gains, and union organizing in Honea Path never recovered.

Survivors remembered that the churches would not open their doors for the funerals. About ten thousand people gathered in a field instead. One man later said, “It just tore the churches up.”

A memorial was finally placed in Dogwood Park in 1995. These are the names cut into it:

Claude Cannon
E. M. Knight
Lee Crawford
Maxie Peterson
Ira Davis
C. L. Rucker
Thomas Yarborough

The words above them read: “They Died for the Rights of the Working Man.”

We have called this service Labor Not in Vain. Those seven names make the phrase difficult, and they should.

The strike was broken. The dead left families behind. Their neighbors mourned them in a field because the churches were afraid to make room. The mill eventually closed, and the town carried its silence for generations.

What can “labor not in vain” possibly mean in front of a history like that?

We could turn Paul’s words into a religious version of “work harder.” Employers have always been happy for preachers to praise the endurance of exhausted people. Honea Path closes off that easy reading. If Paul’s claim has any truth, it must be true where work failed by every measurement the world knows how to take.

Scripture has no fear of that question. Ecclesiastes asks, “What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun?” The word repeated through the book is hevel. Our Bibles often translate it as “vanity.” It means vapor, mist, breath on a cold morning. It is entirely real, and you cannot make it stay.

Qoheleth has watched people build what someone else will own and plant what someone else will eat. He refuses to lie about the arithmetic. Labor can be wasted and stolen. Some work wounds the worker, exhausts the land, and enriches people who never touch either one.

Paul offers no blessing for every demand placed upon a human body. Human dignity comes before productivity. The Sabbath declares that people, animals, and land possess value beyond what can be extracted from them. Even God rests. Faithful labor includes refusing arrangements that consume people and call that consumption necessary.

Then Isaiah gives us a picture of the world such work seeks.

Isaiah speaks to people trying to make a life among ruins. He describes renewed creation through ordinary things. People build houses and live in them. They plant vineyards and eat their fruit. Labor and life belong together again.

Growing up in my Southern Baptist church in the Pee Dee, I heard passages like this directed toward heaven. Isaiah puts the vision on the ground: “They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat.” The hands that build are allowed to dwell. The hands that plant are allowed to harvest.

And then Isaiah says, “For like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be.”

I have a black walnut in my backyard, and lately I’ve begun keeping a deliberate journal of time spent beneath it. This summer it began dropping walnuts in late July, earlier than I expected. The tree was carrying our dry weather in ways I was only beginning to notice.

The walnut was there before we came, and it will likely remain after we are gone. Its roots reach into soil I cannot see. It makes walnuts it will never gather. It works in a time I do not control and cannot complete.

When Isaiah imagines people released from futile labor, he reaches for the life of a tree. Justice takes arboreal time. It means remaining long enough to inhabit what your hands have made while giving yourself to a future whose harvest you may never see.

The next verse says, “They shall not labor in vain.” Its ancient Greek words come remarkably close to Paul’s language in First Corinthians. Whether Paul intended the echo or whether we simply hear the passages together, Isaiah gives Paul’s promise houses, vineyards, children, and trees.

Paul places that creaturely hope inside resurrection.

That is why the first word of Paul’s conclusion matters so much: “Therefore.”

Paul has spent the chapter talking about bodies raised, creation changed, and death swallowed up in victory. Therefore, he says, be steadfast, because your labor is not in vain. The word he uses for labor carries toil and weariness within it. Paul can say that such labor is not empty because resurrection grounds the claim.

Resurrection leaves the losses honest. The strike still broke. The families still grieved. The church doors remained shut. The violence never becomes useful or secretly good.

Then resurrection makes a claim beyond the reach of any mill owner, mayor, market, or gun. The powers that break a life do not possess its final meaning.

Dan Beacham could close the gates. He could fire workers and remove families from company houses. He could help keep their bodies outside the churches of their own town. He could not decide what their lives were worth.

Their deaths were never a price that had to be paid for progress. Their lives possessed a worth no defeat could cancel. Resurrection refuses to surrender that worth to the people who killed them or to the silence that followed.

This story belongs to 1934. The question it asks belongs to us.

Here in Spartanburg, we are living through another rearrangement of labor, land, water, and power. A data center is taking shape at the former Kohler site on South Pine Street. It will require immense amounts of electricity and water while employing a fraction of the people the old mills employed. Three days from now, County Council’s Public Safety Committee will hold a special hearing about data centers.

I have written about that project, and I do not stand outside it. I use these technologies. My research, writing, and daily life move through servers somewhere. The electricity and water serve me too. It is easier to see the machine gun on the roof from ninety-two years away than to see whose labor, land, air, and water support the convenience in my own hand.

Isaiah gives us questions for Wednesday’s hearing. Do those whose lives bear the cost share in the good being built? Can the worker inhabit the house? Can the planter eat the fruit? Will children inherit a place in which they can live?

The machinery changes. The moral stakes remain recognizable.

So I want to leave us with the tree.

The promise of resurrection offers no guarantee that we will finish the work, control the outcome, or live to see the harvest. Isaiah’s first hearers still knew ruins. Paul was executed by an empire. Seven workers at Honea Path received a field instead of a sanctuary, and their families inherited decades of silence.

The promise is arboreal: “Like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be.”

One of my heroes, Wendell Berry, died this week. In his “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” he wrote:

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Faithful work enters a life larger than our own. We cannot command its fruit. We can give ourselves to the life within it. The God who raises the dead holds its meaning beyond the mill, the market, visible success, and the silence afterward.

And one more thing.

Ninety-two years ago, the churches of Honea Path would not make room for the bodies of seven workers.

This morning, on September 6, in a Unitarian Universalist sanctuary, at a progressive Christian service, with a Baptist standing before you, we have spoken their names beneath a church roof.

This is a small act. It comes very late. It cannot repair what happened in that field.

It can break the inherited silence.

Claude Cannon.
E. M. Knight.
Lee Crawford.
Maxie Peterson.
Ira Davis.
C. L. Rucker.
Thomas Yarborough.

“Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”

Amen.

Sources and Further Reading

On Hamburgers and Labor Day

One of those chains of events that future A.P. US History students will study and think, “Huh, why did Americans allow that to happen?” …sort of like what led to Sinclair’s The Jungle in the early 20th century (I had to write an essay on that for my exam when I was one of those A.P. students in 1996)…

Opinion | Why Did Trump Order Up 660 Million Pounds of Mystery Meat? – The New York Times:

Until a new labeling act gets passed, if you want to eat a hamburger, I suggest going to your local butcher shop, rather than the supermarket, ordering cuts of American beef, and asking for them to be ground on the premises. Or grind it at home. Otherwise, there’s really no way of knowing what’s in your meat, or how many international borders it crossed to reach your plate.

The Days of a Tree: On Laboring Not in Vain

I’m preaching here in Spartanburg, SC, today at the Progressive Christian community (held at the Unitarian Universalist Church) at 4 pm. The theme is “laboring not in vain” from Paul, and I’m talking a good deal about the Chiquola Mill Massacre from 92 years ago in a textile mill in Honea Path, SC… how communities can suffer, what our labor means, and how even small towns can bury a Bloody Thursday for decades. I’ll post up the sermon text after the service.

On this day of gatherings, Southern 500’s, and children excited about a Monday off tomorrow, let’s remember these seven men who did not labor in vain and gave their lives in the fight for human dignity.

Claude Cannon.

E. M. Knight.

Lee Crawford.

Maxie Peterson.

Ira Davis.

C. L. Rucker.

Thomas Yarborough.

Practice Resurrection: On the Passing of Wendell Berry

I awoke this morning to the news that Wendell Berry had died, and it devastated me.

Berry is one of those writers whose work has been with me for so long that I have a hard time remembering who I was before I encountered it. But I do remember where it began.

I was a senior at Wofford College, sitting in a seminar class, when I first read “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” I had never read anything quite like it. Calling the experience a Damascus Road moment probably sounds overly dramatic, but that is honestly how I remember it. Something shifted in me that sunny day in 1999 in Spartanburg, SC.

Looking back now, I can recognize it as one of those rare moments when a text does more than teach you something. It rearranges the furniture of your mind. It gives words to things you have already felt but have not yet known how to say.

I remember wondering why I had made it all the way to my senior year at a small Methodist liberal arts college in the Piedmont of South Carolina without encountering Wendell Berry.

Maybe that question mattered almost as much as the poem itself.

Here was someone writing about land and economics and Christianity and farming and politics and affection as though these things had never really been separate. Here was a writer insisting that where we live matters, that what we eat matters, that the health of soil matters, that the scale of things matters, that the work of our hands matters, and that none of those questions can finally be separated from questions about what kind of people we are becoming.

I have read that poem hundreds of times since then. I still return to it almost weekly. The final instruction… “Practice resurrection” has been sitting in the footer of this website since 2003.

And if I ever get another tattoo, there is a very good chance it will be Practice Resurrection or Berry’s fox:

“Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction.”

That line has become something like a spiritual discipline for me.

Make the tracks. Follow the strange trail. Pay attention to what does not seem efficient. Allow yourself to wander. Do not let the people selling efficiency convince you that efficiency is the highest human good.

And, every once in a while, go in the wrong direction.

Berry wasn’t “just” an environmental writer, which is part of what made him so important. He wasn’t only an academic, although he taught at the Univ of Kentucky. He wasn’t an activist in our conventional sense, although he protested more effectively than those of us who have held up clever signs in big cities during marches with thousands of other humans. He was not simply a poet or essayist or novelist or farmer… although he was all of those things.

He was stubbornly difficult to divide into categories because the world he was trying to describe could not be divided that way either.

He understood “conservation” in something closer to its older meaning. To conserve something is not merely to protect an abstract entity called Nature somewhere over there. It is to learn how to inhabit a place well enough that its life can continue.

That requires affection, limits, and memory.

And it requires staying put long enough for a place to teach you something.

One of the great lessons I took from Berry is that the most important journey is not necessarily measured in miles. Sometimes the great journey is downward: the slow movement into a few inches of soil, into the history of a creek, into the names of trees, into the particular people and creatures with whom we have been given a life.

Home, in that sense, is not merely where we return after traveling.

Home is something we learn how to inhabit.

Much of the work I am doing now in Religion and Ecology (a field for which I view him as a patron saint, although he would probably call that blasphemy), including my dissertation work, keeps arriving at that question of place. What does it mean that consciousness is always consciousness somewhere? What does it mean that theology happens in watersheds? What does it mean that a creature is never simply an isolated object but exists among soils, histories, bodies, other creatures, weather, memory, and time?

Those questions have taken me through phenomenology, metaphysics, ecology, and Christian theology.

But Wendell Berry was there first.

Long before I had the language of ecological intentionality, before Edith Stein or Merleau-Ponty entered into this work, Berry had already taught me something fundamental: perception and belonging cannot finally be separated.

You learn a place by loving it.

And you learn yourself differently when you begin to understand yourself as belonging to a place.

Modern life is remarkably good at hiding this from us.

We talk about “the cloud,” as though our photographs and emails float somewhere above us rather than being stored in buildings that occupy land, consume electricity, draw water, and require enormous material infrastructure.

We talk about “the grid,” as though electricity were an abstraction rather than something produced somewhere, transported across landscapes, and entangled with particular rivers, mountains, mines, forests, farms, and communities. Even our food appears beneath fluorescent lights as though it originated on a grocery-store shelf. Berry spent a lifetime reminding us to look behind these abstractions.

Where did this come from?

Who made it?

What soil grew it?

What community bears its cost?

What happens to the place after we have taken what we wanted from it?

Those are ecological questions. They are economic questions. They are political questions.

I increasingly believe they are theological questions as well.

Berry helped me see that theology, ecology, and place are not three different subjects that occasionally happen to overlap. They are different ways of approaching the same ancient human problem: how are we to live here, together?

Our scriptures and political traditions are full of arguments about belonging, inheritance, exile, land, neighbor, stranger, household, commonwealth, wilderness, garden, and home. We tend to abstract those words into ideas. Berry kept pushing them back into the ground.

Who is your neighbor?

Where does your water come from?

What happens to the soil after you are gone?

What does your way of life require of someone, or somewhere, you cannot see?

Those questions have followed me from that Wofford classroom into nearly everything I have done since.

I never met Wendell Berry. I always hoped I might. I got to meet Willie Nelson, a few Presidents, and Seamus Heaney. But I will always regret not getting to have a quick chat with Berry.

Instead I read him (a lot). I listen to him and watch copious amounts of old interviews on YouTube. I return to the poems, and I find myself writing my own poetry that sounds too much like him. I argue with him often. I try, probably unsuccessfully, to imitate some of the patience of his prose and some of the stubborn particularity of his vision. I think we both shared the blessing and the curse of the cup of righteous indignation (thanks to Larry T. McGehee at Wofford who admonished me for my own).

And somewhere along the way, without entirely realizing it, his questions became some of my questions.

So today I am simply grateful.

Grateful for a poem encountered at the right time in my stubborn life.

Grateful for a writer who refused to allow land to become scenery in his stubborn life.

Grateful for someone who insisted that a human life is not made larger by escaping limits but can become deeper by accepting the responsibilities of belonging.

And grateful for the reminder that place is not merely the backdrop against which our lives occur.

Place participates in making us who we are.

To lose that relationship is therefore more than an environmental problem. It is a crisis of perception. We become less able to recognize what kind of creatures we are: dependent, embodied, located, receiving our lives every moment from worlds we did not make.

Perhaps that is why Berry’s work struck me so deeply all those years ago, even before I understood what it was doing to me. It was teaching me to come home. Always coming home, to pull from Ursula Le Guin.

There is grief today. But there is also work to do.

Pay attention to the creek.

Learn the trees.

Know where the water goes after it leaves your yard.

Grow something.

Stay somewhere long enough to love it.

Make a few unnecessary tracks.

Maybe even some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

Plasma Consciousness and Edith Stein: Can Matter Have an Inner Life?

Plasma, empathy, and the interval between relation and experience

I have written several times about plasma consciousness (it’s something I’m really fascinated about from my background of teaching Physics for so many years), especially in a short piece called “Plasma Consciousness: Thinking With the Luminous Universe.” Of everything I have published here over the past year, that post has continued to find the most readers.

I think I understand some of the attraction. Plasma makes the universe feel strange again.

Most of the visible matter in the universe exists as plasma: charged particles moving through electrical and magnetic fields, forming currents, filaments, waves, instabilities, and structures that stretch from the atmosphere of the Sun to the space between galaxies. Plasma behaves collectively. Its form arises through relation, feedback, disturbance, and response.

That language has always sounded close to the process-relational philosophy that has shaped much of my work. It makes the old picture of inert matter increasingly difficult to sustain. The universe appears less like a collection of finished objects and more like an ongoing formation of relations.

The word consciousness, though, makes a further claim.

Does response imply experience? Does self-organization mean that there is some center for whom the organization matters? Is relationality already a form of interiority, or does consciousness require a kind of embodied organization that plasma does not possess?

My recent work on ecological intentionality, especially through Edith Stein, has made those questions harder and more interesting.

What plasma can do

A recent preprint by Nicolás Hinrichs and several colleagues, “Life as Plasmas: Autonomy and Interactivism in-materio,” caught my eye and approaches plasma through a question that comes before the attribution of consciousness: what physical conditions must a system satisfy before life, agency, or consciousness becomes plausible?

The authors use complex dusty plasmas as test cases. These systems exist far from thermodynamic equilibrium. They require a continuous energy supply, generate and maintain boundaries, respond to noise, retain traces of previous states, and preserve their forms under changing conditions.

The paper identifies several conditions for what the authors call minimal physical autonomy:

sustained energy throughput;
organizational closure;
active information maintenance;
regulated sensitivity to noise.

Plasma systems appear to satisfy important parts of this organizational picture. They can form boundaries without membranes, maintain structures through energy flow, respond collectively to disturbances, and carry a kind of physical memory through hysteresis and persistent topological patterns.

The authors remain careful. They do not claim that plasma is alive. They do not claim that it thinks or experiences. Plasma lacks the informational heredity required for open-ended biological evolution, and some of the proposed measurements of organizational closure still require refinement.

The significance of plasma lies in what it makes possible to ask. Material systems can display remarkable degrees of autonomy, memory, and responsiveness before we have any reason to attribute consciousness to them.

Edith Stein and the presence of another center

Edith Stein began with a different limit case. In On the Problem of Empathy, she asked how another person’s experience becomes genuinely given to me as my own.

For Stein, empathy is a form of perception. If I encounter another person grieving, the grief becomes present to me through expression, gesture, speech, bodily bearing, and situation. I encounter the grief as real, though I do not live it from the center where the other person lives it.

Stein calls this difference non-primordiality. The other’s grief is primordial there and non-primordial here. I can draw near to it, understand it more fully, and allow it to change me. The experience never becomes mine.

Distance remains inside the encounter.

This is why Stein has become so important for my work. Her phenomenology allows for genuine relation while preserving the other’s irreducibility. Empathy gives access without possession. Another life can become perceptible while retaining a center I do not occupy.

Plasma presses this account toward its boundary.

I can observe a plasma system maintaining form, responding to disturbance, and carrying traces of its past. I can describe the energy flows and fields through which it persists. What remains absent is the expressive fulfillment through which an experiencing center becomes given as an experiencing center.

That absence does not make plasma inert. It makes my language accountable.

The universe may be relational without every relation being conscious. Matter may be responsive without every response being felt. Organization may prepare the conditions for experience while leaving its emergence unexplained.

Stein lets me hold those possibilities open without turning openness into projection.

Intimacy with remainder

I recently described the next stage of my work as “intimacy with remainder.” The phrase brings Stein’s account of non-primordiality into conversation with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of flesh and écart.

Merleau-Ponty helps explain how bodies already belong to a shared sensible world. The one who sees is also visible. The one who touches can be touched. Perception arises within a field of belonging that precedes any clean division between an isolated subject and an external world.

Stein protects the otherness within that belonging. Merleau-Ponty’s écart, the divergence or spacing carried within relation, keeps shared flesh from becoming fusion.

Plasma may be a particularly useful limit case for this emerging framework. Plasma belongs to the same material cosmos from which living and conscious bodies arise. Its fields pass through planetary atmospheres, shape stars, produce auroras, and participate in the long material history that eventually becomes soil, trees, animals, and human bodies. That’s real intimacy.

The remainder is everything its organization does not disclose. There may be forms of interiority that exceed our present concepts. There may also be no experiential center there at all. Honest attention has to leave both possibilities open.

Before my next examination

This summer I completed my first comprehensive examination at CIIS, “Ecological Intentionality, Creaturely Form, and the Ecology of the Cross.” That paper asked how another living being becomes perceptible as a life with its own directedness, form, and manner of inhabiting a world.

The next examination will return more directly to Stein and Merleau-Ponty. I want to know whether Stein’s protection of otherness and Merleau-Ponty’s account of belonging can inhabit one ecological framework.

The plasma question now belongs inside that work.

If reality is relational, what forms of relation generate interiority? If matter can remember, organize, and respond, when does any of that become experience? How can we remain open to forms of mind beyond the human without filling the cosmos with reflections of ourselves?

These are also questions for the Ecology of the Cross. Plasma reconnection, biological injury, ecological disturbance, and human suffering may all involve vulnerability, though they do so in different modes. A cruciform cosmology must preserve those differences. The language of suffering only becomes meaningful where something can be suffered. Participation in creation does not require every creature or material process to possess the same kind of interior life.

I still return to the black walnut behind our house. At night it becomes a dark form against a sky filled with processes I can barely imagine. The tree, the atmosphere, the solar wind, and my own body belong to one material history. That belonging is intimate and real. It does not make any of us transparent to the others.

I still believe the cosmos hums.

Edith Stein is teaching me to listen more carefully before deciding who is speaking.

References and Further Reading

Harrelson, Sam. “Ecological Intentionality, Creaturely Form, and the Ecology of the Cross.” 2026.

Harrelson, Sam. “Intimacy with Remainder: Toward Ecological Intentionality.” 2026.

Hinrichs, Nicolás, Mahault Albarracin, Felipe Engelberger, Leonardo Christov-Moore, and Daniel Polani. “Life as Plasmas: Autonomy and Interactivism in-materio.” arXiv preprint, July 2026.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Northwestern University Press, 1968.

Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Translated by Waltraut Stein. ICS Publications, 1989.

Home Ground: Two Sundays at the UU Church of Spartanburg

At the Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg, what I would ordinarily call a sermon is called a meditation. That turned out to be the right word for what I was invited to offer there over two Sundays this August.

Their Minister, the incredible Scott Neely, asked me to think with the congregation about home. I had been writing for much of the summer about watersheds, attention, Edith Stein, and the moral life of a place, so I began with the most ordinary piece of ground I know: the slope behind our house in Spartanburg, where rain leaves the roof, crosses the yard beneath a black walnut, and begins its long movement toward Fairforest Creek, the Pacolet, the Broad, the Congaree, the Santee, and finally the Atlantic.

The two meditations became a small series called Home Ground: Watershed, Attention, and the Life We Hold in Common. The first asked where the water goes. The second asked what we demand of it while it is here. Between those questions is much of what I have been trying to understand in my academic work and my writing at Carolina Ecology: how attention reveals a world already shared, how empathy corrects the assumption that my own position is the center of that world, and how those discoveries become obligations within the places where we actually live.

The First Home Is a Watershed

The first meditation began with a roof and a claim that has stayed with me: every house in this county sits on a slope, and the slope decides where the water goes.

That sentence sounds like hydrology because it is simple hydrology (which I loved teaching in my years as a Middle School Science teacher!). It also unsettles many of our usual ways of describing home. A deed tells me where my property ends. Water crosses that line without consulting it. A street address places our house within a human system of roads and mail routes. The watershed gives us another address entirely. It tells us that we are downstream of someone and upstream of someone else, receiving what has already passed through another place and sending something onward in turn.

This is where Edith Stein’s account of empathy entered the meditation. Stein describes the lived body as the zero point of orientation, the here around which every there arranges itself. Encounter with another person reveals another center, another here from which I appear as a there. The encounter does not erase the difference between us. It discloses a common world that neither of us invented and neither of us owns.

I have come to think that a watershed can teach something similar. The water won’t let my yard remain the center. It leaves. It carries the material history of one place into another. It gives the abstract claim that we are related a direction, a gradient, and sometimes a muddy pair of shoes.

The meditation also returned to the black walnut in our backyard, where I sit most mornings before the children wake and the day becomes noisy. After enough mornings, a tree ceases to be scenery. It becomes a tutor in the discipline of attention. That tree has been holding a corner of our slope together, shading our children, feeding squirrels, and keeping the red clay from leaving for the creek. The ground has been keeping us all along.

The full service is below. The video begins at the start of the meditation, though the music, readings, and life of the congregation are worth hearing too.

The meditation begins at 25:24.

The complete text is available at Carolina Ecology: The First Home Is a Watershed.

What We Ask of the Water

The first Sunday moved from hydrology toward relation. The second had to ask what relation costs.

That week the question became unavoidably local. On South Pine Street, at the former Kohler factory site, a large data center project was moving forward. At a county fact-finding meeting, Spartanburg Water estimated that the facility would use roughly 459,000 gallons of water each day, an amount comparable to the use of more than two thousand single-family homes. County Council had also delayed the final reading of a proposed data center moratorium until September.

Those facts placed an old prophetic text inside the county calendar. Amos speaks to a society that is prosperous, religious, and convinced of its own order. He calls for justice to roll down like water and righteousness like an enduring stream. The Hebrew image is stronger and stranger than the familiar English rendering sometimes allows. Amos imagines a seasonal watercourse that keeps running, a torrent that cannot be waited out or crossed on foot.

The important question was larger than whether the water system has the technical capacity to serve one more customer. Engineers can answer that question, and their answer matters. Another question stands behind it: Who belongs to the “we” making the request? Who is present when the cost is assessed? How far downstream does the moral community extend?

Here, Stein’s account of empathy became political. A public hearing, at its best, is a civic practice for shifting the zero point. It brings other centers of experience into the room and reveals that the official account of a place is partial. A person who wakes to the sound of construction at three in the morning knows something a permit does not contain. A longtime water customer knows something that cannot be reduced to projected capacity. Lawson’s Fork, the Pacolet, and the Broad hold claims that our procedures still have difficulty hearing.

I also wanted to say plainly that I am implicated in the demand. I use the cloud every day. My doctoral work, this website, Carolina Ecology, and the sermon itself depend upon machines housed in buildings like the one being built on South Pine Street. Innocence would be a false position from which to speak. The more useful work is to ask whether the arrangements among us are right, whether the public has genuinely been allowed to appear, and whether the water will leave the encounter diminished.

The full service is below. Once again, the recording begins at the meditation, and once again I recommend the whole service. TJ Turner’s music, including Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology),” made its own argument more eloquently than I could.

The meditation begins at 33:40.

The complete text is available at Carolina Ecology: What We Ask of the Water.

A Common World

I am deeply grateful to Scott and Anne, Erin and Kimberly, TJ and Clemson, Janice, and the staff and tech team at UUCS for their hospitality and trust. I am especially grateful to the congregation. The conversations after both services continued the meditations in ways I could never have written beforehand. Several people gave me new questions about the proposed ordinance, the history of this county, and the responsibilities carried by people who depend upon the same systems they are trying to examine.

That experience clarified something about the relationship between my academic work and public theology. I have been using the phrase ecological intentionality to describe a form of attention adequate to a world of living relations. In a seminar paper, that can remain a conceptual problem. In a sanctuary, with a bowl of water rippling near the chalice and a county decision approaching on the calendar, the idea has to touch the ground.

These two Sundays helped me see the movement more clearly. Attention teaches us where we are. Empathy reveals that our view from here is one view among others. A watershed gives that common world a material form. Public life asks whether we will organize our decisions as though any of this were true.

The map shows ownership. The slope shows relation. We need both kinds of knowledge. Only one of them tells us where the water is already going.

Ecological Intentionality, Creaturely Form, and The Ecology of the Cross

I finished the first of my two comprehensive examination papers this summer in the Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. The paper is titled “Ecological Intentionality, Creaturely Form, and The Ecology of the Cross: A Cruciform Phenomenology of Creaturely Relation.” It’s the most sustained attempt I have made so far to explain what I mean by ecological intentionality and why I believe perception belongs near the beginning of our ecological thinking.

Over the summer, I have moved through Aristotle’s potency and act, Edith Stein’s empathy and finite being, Henri Bergson’s duration, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s embodied perception, Raymond Ruyer’s organic form, and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of difference. It’s certainly a crowded bibliography. The question holding it together remained much closer to home: What am I perceiving when I look at the black walnut growing in our backyard?

Calling it a tree is necessary. Describing it as a specimen, a source of shade, a carbon sink, a collection of biological processes, or even a theological symbol may also disclose something true. Obviously, those descriptions don’t exhaust its life. The black walnut is directed within its own world, however. Its roots follow water through Piedmont clay. Its leaves turn toward light. Its form persists through growth, damage, weather, and season. That living directedness can enter my perception, although it never becomes primordial to me in the way my own experience does. The tree’s world meets mine without becoming mine.

Ecological intentionality names that encounter. More specifically, it describes the relation among a living organism, the milieu within which its life unfolds, and the embodied perceiver to whom some portion of that life becomes given. The ethical possibilities of the encounter depend partly upon how the perceiver has learned to see. Perception has already been shaped by habits, desires, technologies, institutions, and inherited ideas about which lives matter before an ethical principle ever reaches us.

This is where The Ecology of the Cross enters my argument. Phenomenology can teach us to look more carefully. Sustained attention can still leave the appetite for possession intact. I can observe a creature closely, describe it accurately, and continue to treat its life as something available for my use. Edith Stein’s final, unfinished book, The Science of the Cross, helped me name the transformation required at this point. Drawing upon John of the Cross, Stein describes a form of knowing in which the knower must also be changed. The desire to master what has been given must undergo its own emptying.

The Ecology of the Cross names this movement from mastery toward reception. It is a distinctly Christian account of the human perceiver’s transformation, grounded in the cruciform pattern of self-giving rather than self-possession. The cross does not provide an easy reconciliation with ecological loss. It asks what must be relinquished within the perceiver so that another creature can appear as a life with its own form, its own directedness, and its own excess beyond our use.

The paper remains a framework rather than a finished environmental ethic. It leaves political, historical, and practical questions open, including the question that matters most for the larger project: What does this way of seeing require from us in particular places, especially here in the Piedmont and Lowcountry of the Carolinas?

That question will carry me into my second comprehensive examination. Comps II begins this Fall semester where this paper ends, bringing Stein into a more sustained conversation with Merleau-Ponty’s flesh and écart. The shorthand I have begun using is this: Stein protects otherness. Merleau-Ponty explains belonging. Their conjunction may offer a way of describing ecological relation as intimacy with remainder.

Abstract

This paper develops ecological intentionality as a cruciform phenomenology of creaturely relation. Environmental ethics begins within a perceptual field already shaped by embodiment, habit, desire, and relation. I therefore ask what kind of world becomes visible when living beings are understood as internally formed, dynamically unfolding, and situated within milieus that exceed the horizon of any single perceiver.

Drawing on Aristotle, Edith Stein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Bergson, Raymond Ruyer, Emmanuel Levinas, and Deleuze and Guattari, I distinguish vital directedness, the immanent activity of a living form, from perceptual intentionality, the givenness of that life to another embodied perceiver. Ecological intentionality names the encounter between these poles across an intersecting organism-milieu-perceiver field. Stein’s account of empathy preserves the non-primordial otherness of another life, while Aristotelian potency and act, Bergsonian duration, and Ruyer’s account of organic form provide a vocabulary for understanding creaturely being as form-in-act. Plant life serves as a limit case, revealing where ecological intentionality extends beyond empathy proper. Perception precedes ethics within the order of inquiry, although it does not create the ethical authority of the other.

The final movement turns to Stein’s The Science of the Cross and John of the Cross. I argue that truthful ecological perception may require a transformation of the perceiver’s appetites, since attention can still convert givenness into possession. The Ecology of the Cross names this Christologically shaped passage from mastery toward reception. The paper offers a perceptual, metaphysical, and theological framework within which an environmental ethic might form, while leaving its political and practical elaboration open to future work in the Piedmont and Lowcountry of the Carolinas.

Download Available:

Ecological Intentionality Creaturely Form and The Ecology of the Cross Download

Intimacy with Remainder: Toward Ecological Intentionality

Notes toward an ecological intentionality, between one comprehensive exam and the next

The black walnut behind our house is dropping fruit again. It does this every year before I think it should. By late July, while the rest of the yard still seems occupied with the green abundance of summer, the first walnuts begin striking the roof of the shed and landing in the grass with a weight you can hear from inside. Their husks are green and firm at first. Give them a few days in the heat and rain and they soften, darken, and stain whatever touches them.

I have been watching this tree for several seasons now. Watching may be too dignified a word for some of it. I step around the walnuts when I cut the grass. I move them before Lily finds one and decides it belongs inside. I watch the squirrels carry them along the fence and occasionally find one buried in a flowerpot where no walnut tree could possibly grow for long. The tree has become a familiar part of the arrangement of our yard, and familiarity carries its own danger. A thing seen every day can disappear into its usefulness, inconvenience, name, or location. It becomes shade. It becomes mess. It becomes the black walnut behind the house.

Yet the tree keeps exceeding every one of those descriptions.

That excess is where much of my academic work has been gathering. Over the summer, I completed the first of two comprehensive examinations for my doctoral program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. The paper tried to give a philosophical and theological account of something I have been circling for several years: how another living being becomes perceptible as a life with its own directedness, its own tempo, and its own manner of inhabiting a world.

I have been calling this ecological intentionality.

The phrase names an encounter between two kinds of directedness. A living being tends toward and within its world through the powers by which it maintains and develops its form. A perceiver, also embodied and situated, can encounter that directed life without exhausting it. The walnut reaches through soil, water, light, season, damage, and repair. I encounter some part of that activity from within another body, another tempo, and another set of concerns. Both of us inhabit a larger ecological field that neither of us contains.

That formulation is still under construction. It almost certainly has weak joints I can’t yet see. The first comprehensive paper built the basic frame through Aristotle, Edith Stein, Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Ruyer, Gilles Deleuze, Michael Marder, and John of the Cross. It ended by asking what has to happen to a perceiver whose habits of mastery continue to turn a living being into something available for possession, even after the perceiver has learned to describe that being more carefully.

The second examination begins this fall. It returns to several questions the first paper left open, especially a tension between Edith Stein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty that I think may lead somewhere important.

The formulation I am working with is this:

Stein’s non-primordiality and Merleau-Ponty’s écart can be read as complementary disciplines within ecological intentionality. Flesh names the shared sensible field that makes encounter possible; non-primordiality names the irreducible difference that every encounter preserves. Their conjunction describes ecological relation as intimacy with remainder.

That sentence is dense enough to require some unpacking, and I am still unpacking it myself.

Stein and the distance within empathy

Edith Stein wrote On the Problem of Empathy as a young philosopher working in the early phenomenological movement around Edmund Husserl. Empathy, for Stein, has a more exact meaning than the word usually carries now. Stein uses it for the experience through which another’s experience becomes genuinely given to me as another’s, beyond kindness, emotional sensitivity, or the imaginative act of placing myself in someone else’s situation.

If a friend is grieving, I can encounter the grief as real and as belonging to this person before me. I do not live the grief from the point at which my friend lives it. It is primordial there and non-primordial here. The experience becomes present to me without becoming mine.

This is one of Stein’s great contributions. The distance between us remains within the empathy itself. Greater understanding does not gradually erase the distinction between the one grieving and the one who encounters that grief. I may listen more carefully, learn the history, recognize the gestures of a body I know well, and follow the grief into a richer fulfillment. The other person still possesses a center of experience I do not occupy.

Stein calls the lived body the Leib, distinguishing it from the body considered as a physical thing, the Körper. The lived body is a zero point of orientation, a center around which a world opens. Another person appears through an expressive body as another such center. Empathy gives genuine access, though never total access. Something remains.

That remainder is easy to misinterpret as a failure. We often imagine that perfect understanding would eliminate the distance between us. Stein’s account suggests that some distance belongs to truthful understanding. The other’s inexhaustibility is part of what is given.

This becomes especially important when I turn from another person toward the more-than-human world. A dog expresses pain, anticipation, fear, trust, and excitement through a body whose movements I can learn to read. The mode of fulfillment differs from my encounter with another person, and bodily difference matters. At the vegetal limit, the problem becomes sharper. The black walnut discloses directed activity through growth, fruiting, response, damage, and seasonal form. I can perceive a life underway. I do not know what it is like to be this tree, or even whether that sentence asks the right question of a plant.

The tree’s distance from me belongs inside the relation and disciplines it. Stein protects the tree from the confidence with which I might turn my own experience into a theory of its interior.

Merleau-Ponty and the flesh of belonging

Stein gives me a powerful account of the other center, though her analysis can leave a further question waiting. How do these centers belong to one another before empathy becomes an explicit act? What makes encounter possible in the first place?

Merleau-Ponty begins with the body already involved in a world. We don’t first exist as sealed minds and then work our way outward toward trees, other people, water, soil, or weather. Perception arises through a body that can move, touch, see, hear, reach, tire, hunger, and be wounded. The body opens a world because it already belongs to that world.

His later work names this belonging through the flesh of the world. Flesh names the intertwining through which the one who sees is also visible, and the one who touches can also be touched. Reading it as one mystical substance from which everything is made would obscure the divergence carried within that intertwining. My hand belongs to the tangible world it explores. My body stands among the things it sees. Perception carries exposure within it.

This reversibility is never complete. When one hand touches the other, the touching hand and the touched hand can exchange roles, though they never coincide perfectly in one completed experience. Merleau-Ponty uses écart to name a divergence or gap that persists within relation. Belonging has a spacing within it. The world joins us without making us identical.

This is what Merleau-Ponty can bring to ecological intentionality. The walnut and I meet within the same rain, summer heat, Piedmont clay, gravity, and changing light. We participate in the same watershed, though we inhabit it through very different bodies and at very different tempos. The tree is visible because both of us already belong to a sensible world. I am also visible within that world. The encounter runs in more than one direction, even where the directions are unequal.

Merleau-Ponty explains belonging.

Stein protects otherness.

I am trying to determine whether those accounts can inhabit one framework.

Intimacy with remainder

The risk on Stein’s side is that the protection of otherness can leave living beings standing across a distance that has to be bridged. Empathy may begin to look like a passage between centers already formed in isolation. The ecological field, bodily participation, and reciprocal exposure remain thinly described.

The risk on Merleau-Ponty’s side is almost the reverse. Flesh and intertwining can become so encompassing that the other creature’s distinct life begins to dissolve into shared belonging. Ecological writing is especially vulnerable to this move. We speak of kinship, communion, interconnection, and entanglement. Those words can tell the truth. They can also make us feel closer than our attention has earned.

Stein’s non-primordiality may provide an internal discipline for Merleau-Ponty’s flesh. Merleau-Ponty’s écart may describe the belonging within which non-primordial encounter becomes possible. Flesh names the shared sensible field. Non-primordiality names the difference that the field never abolishes.

Their conjunction is what I mean by intimacy with remainder.

Intimacy means that encounter is real. Bodies participate in one world and become perceptible through that participation. The walnut is not a private image projected by my consciousness. Its roots, crown, leaves, fruit, wounds, and responses belong to a life that shows itself through its activity. I can learn this tree. I can be changed by learning it.

Remainder means that the tree’s life never becomes equivalent to its appearance for me. Better knowledge deepens the encounter while leaving the tree’s own center, activity, and history excessive to my horizon. The remainder names the irreducibility of a life whose activity belongs to itself. It requires no occult essence hidden behind appearances.

This may be another way of speaking about love. Love requires nearness, attention, vulnerability, and real involvement. Love also gives up the fantasy that nearness grants possession. The beloved remains more than the lover’s experience of them. Ecological relation may require the same discipline.

The cross and the danger of innocence

My larger theological framework is something I have been calling The Ecology of the Cross, borrowing deliberately from Stein’s final, unfinished book, The Science of the Cross. In the first comprehensive paper, I used the Carmelite tradition to describe the transformation of a perceiver whose appetite for mastery keeps converting what is given into what is available.

Attention alone does not cure possession. I can know the walnut’s species, record its phenology, learn the chemistry of juglone, photograph its bark, and describe its place in the yard while continuing to see it primarily as mine. Better information can coexist with ownership’s deepest habits. The Ecology of the Cross asks what kind of dispossession those habits require.

That word now needs more care than I gave it at first. Cruciform dispossession describes the loosening of a perceiver’s claim to mastery. Material dispossession describes the imposed loss of land, inheritance, access, home, and political power. The first can never be prescribed to people suffering the second. A theology of self-emptying becomes dangerous when it is preached by those who benefit from someone else’s loss.

This is another direction the second examination will take. Melanie Harris’s ecowomanism and LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant’s work on lived memory among Gullah/Geechee women press the framework toward histories and forms of presence that phenomenological attention by itself cannot supply. No perception of a place begins without history. Land carries memory, ownership, labor, grief, displacement, religious practice, and relations with the dead. These may not announce themselves to the solitary observer who believes careful attention has made him innocent.

Intimacy with remainder therefore has political consequences. The remainder includes the creature’s excess over my perception. It also includes the histories my perception has not yet learned to see. Restraint before the other requires curiosity about what has been concealed, suppressed, or made unavailable to me.

The Piedmont and Lowcountry cannot become interchangeable examples of “Carolina nature” in this work. The black walnut grounds my own sustained practice of attention in Spartanburg. Gullah/Geechee lived religion enters as an interlocutor with histories, practices, and meanings that exceed my framework. If ecological intentionality is worth anything, particular places must be able to correct its concepts.

A work still underway

I don’t know yet whether Stein and Merleau-Ponty will finally hold together in the way I am proposing. Their questions are different. Stein asks how another experience is given as another’s. Merleau-Ponty asks how perceiver and perceived arise within an intertwined sensible field. Non-primordiality may turn out to be the experiential form of écart between embodied centers. That is a possibility I need to earn through the texts.

Other questions remain. Can Ruyer’s account of a living form’s self-survey help explain why damage and flourishing are real for the organism itself? Can Maximus’s account of the logoi hold creaturely integrity and cosmic participation together? How deeply does incarnation enter biological vulnerability and evolutionary suffering? What kinds of historical and political analysis must accompany phenomenology if attention is to become accountable?

These are questions for the fall and, likely, for the dissertation that follows. For now, intimacy with remainder gives me a phrase for the kind of relation I am trying to describe.

The walnuts will keep falling for another month or so. Their husks will darken in the grass. The squirrels will carry some away, and a few will remain hidden until I strike them with the mower next spring. I will continue trying to see the tree whose life makes all of this possible, knowing that the seeing matters and that the tree remains more than anything I will manage to say about it.

Perhaps ecological love begins there: close enough to be marked, attentive enough to be corrected, and humble enough to leave a remainder.

References and Further Reading

Aristotle. De Anima. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2017.

Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1991.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Harris, Melanie L. Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2017.

John of the Cross. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Revised edition. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991.

Manigault-Bryant, LeRhonda S. Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

Marder, Michael. “Plant Intelligence and Attention.” Plant Signaling & Behavior 8, no. 5 (2013): e23902.

Marder, Michael. “Plant Intentionality and the Phenomenological Framework of Plant Intelligence.” Plant Signaling & Behavior 7, no. 11 (2012): 1365–1372.

Maximus the Confessor. On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua. Vol. 1. Edited and translated by Nicholas Constas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France. Compiled by Dominique Séglard. Translated by Robert Vallier. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge, 2012.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

Ruyer, Raymond. Neofinalism. Translated by Alyosha Edlebi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Stein, Edith. Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being. Translated by Kurt F. Reinhardt. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 9. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.

Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Translated by Waltraut Stein. 3rd revised edition. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989.

Stein, Edith. The Science of the Cross. Translated by Josephine Koeppel. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 6. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.

Answering a 9 year old question

I wrote this post in August of 2017 on the growing adoption of smart home devices (Alexa, Google Home, etc.). And now I’m using Wispr Flow to make this post from my iPhone (which looks roughly the same as one from 2017 but has changed so much) and I find myself using voice much more than fingers to do my work of writing.

There will be a combination of voice AND augmented reality AND artificial intelligence that will power how we communicate with ourselves, our homes, our environments, and the people we love (and perhaps don’t love). In twenty years, will my young son be typing onto a keyboard in the same way I’m doing to compose this post? In ten years, will my 10-year-old daughter be typing onto a keyboard to do her job or express herself?
Voice Isn’t the Next Big Platform

My now 18 year old daughter does lots of voice transcription and my 10 year old son has no idea how to type on a keyboard (granted, most of that is bc of our parenting choices around screens and devices and his Montessori education).

Fun to dig up old questions and see where they land a few years later.

Comps Paper Completed!

Just finished my paper for Comprehensive Exams in my PhD program (came in at 54 pages)…Ecological Intentionality, Creaturely Form, and The Ecology of the Cross: A Cruciform Phenomenology of Creaturely Relation.

Basically laying out the whole framework of The Ecology of the Cross with ecological intentionality as a tool. Lots of Edith Stein, Aristotle, Bergson, Ruyer, and St John of the Cross while arguing with Deleuze. Fun times!

Going to go sleep for a few days (just kidding, we have 3 young kids). 🥱

Being Addressed by the World (and CIIS)

Nice surprise to see CIIS doing a little feature on my work! What a great community, and I highly recommend the Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion program. Wofford College, Yale University, Gardner-Webb University, and CIIS have shaped so much of my life over these last 30 (yikes!) years, and I’m so grateful for them!

Being Addressed by the World: A Ph.D. in the More-Than-Human | CIIS:

My north star is a form of scholarship and teaching that helps people learn how to attend more carefully to one another and to the more-than-human world.
Sam Harrelson, Ph.D. ’27, Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion

Edith Stein’s Feast Day and On the Problem of Empathy

On the Feast of Edith Stein, August 9. A shorter, more devotional companion to this post appeared this morning at Carolina Ecology.

The church keeps a martyr’s feast on the day of her death… the dies natalis, the birthday into the life that doesn’t end. August 9 belongs to Edith Stein, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau on this day in 1942. I’ve written here before about the late Stein, the Carmelite metaphysician of Finite and Eternal Being and The Science of the Cross. Today I want to go back to the doctoral dissertation she defended at Freiburg on August 3, 1916, six days short of twenty-six years before her death, published the following year as Zum Problem der Einfühlung. It’s the text where my own project (Ecology of the Cross) starts, and on her feast day, it seems right to give it the same reading I’ve given the later works, because the line from this dissertation to the gas chamber is not an interruption of a philosophical career. It’s the completion of an argument.

The Question in 1916

Some historical grounding is important here. Stein came to Göttingen in 1913 to study with Edmund Husserl because the Logical Investigations had convinced her that consciousness opens onto things themselves, and she followed him to Freiburg when he took the chair there. Husserl had been gesturing at the problem of Einfühlung, of how another consciousness is given to me, since at least 1905, and he’d promised repeatedly to treat it properly. He never quite did, at least not in print or to satisfaction, and he handed the problem to his doctoral student Edith. She defended the dissertation summa cum laude and then spent the next two years as his first assistant, organizing and substantially editing the manuscripts that would eventually become Ideas II… which means that the analyses of the lived body that generations of readers have absorbed as Husserlian bear her fingerprints throughout (in my opinion). When Merleau-Ponty built the Phenomenology of Perception on the Ideas II material he consulted at Louvain, he was, at least in part, also building on Stein. I take a certain satisfaction in that genealogy, since my own framework of ecological intentionality runs through both Stein and Merleau-Ponty.

Stein’s published treatise has three main movements: the essence of acts of empathy, the constitution of the psycho-physical individual, and empathy as the understanding of spiritual persons. Stein’s first move is to clear the field. Empathy, she argues, is a sui generis form of intentionality. It isn’t inference by analogy (I don’t reason my way from your grimace to your pain), it isn’t imitation, and, against Theodor Lipps, it isn’t Einsfühlung, a feeling-into that merges me with you.

In empathy, the foreign experience is given to me non-primordially: your grief announces itself in my field with genuine givenness, and yet it remains irreducibly yours. I’m pulled into it, I can follow its sense, but I never occupy it. The act preserves the distance it crosses. This is also what distinguishes empathy from sympathy or fellow-feeling (Mitfühlen), where I have my own primordial feeling about your state. Empathy is prior to all of that. It’s the act by which there is an other there for me at all.

That structural insistence on distance-preserved-in-givenness has become, for me, the philosophical spine of any ecological perception that is both oriented rightly and practical. The alternative on one side is projection, where I dress the world in my own states and call it kinship. The alternative on the other side is objectification, where the world is Körper all the way down. Stein’s empathy threads between them, and she does it with an analytic patience that the nature-mysticism shelf almost never manages.

The Constitution of the Living Body

The center of the treatise, and the part I was annotating yet again under the black walnut this morning, is the constitution of the psycho-physical individual. Stein asks the question directly:

“How is my body [Leib] constituted within consciousness?” (Stein, 2016)

German gives her the distinction English conflates without an adjective to help: Körper, the physical body, one object among objects, and Leib, the living body, the body I don’t observe so much as inhabit. Her claim is that these are two givennesses of one reality, and the difference between them is the difference between a world of things and a world with someone home in it:

“A living body [Leib] only perceived outwardly would always be only a particularly disposed, actually unique, physical body, but never ‘my living body.'” (Stein, 2016)

How, then, is the Leib given? Through sensation, and here Stein’s analysis gets genuinely strange in the way good phenomenology is strange. Sensation is always localized somewhere, in a hand, behind the eyes, near the “I” but never in it:

“Since sensation is always spatially localized ‘somewhere’ at a distance from the ‘I’ (perhaps very near to it but never in it), I can never find the ‘I’ in it by reflection. And this ‘somewhere’ is not an empty point in space, but something filling up space. All these entities from which my sensations arise are amalgamated into a unity, the unity of my living body, and they are themselves places in the living body.” (Stein, 2016)

And the unity of those places arranges itself around what she calls the zero point of orientation:

“To speak of distance from ‘me’ is inexact because I cannot really establish an interval from the ‘I,’ for it is non-spatial and cannot be localized. But I relate the parts of my living body, together with everything spatial outside of it, to a ‘zero point of orientation’ which my living body surrounds. This zero point is not to be geometrically localized at one point in my physical body; nor is it the same for all data. It is localized in the head for visual data and in mid-body for tactile data. Thus, whatever refers to the ‘I’ has no distance from the zero point, and all that is given at a distance from the zero point is also given at a distance from the ‘I.'” (Stein, 2016)

Every spatial thing is given from the zero point, and the zero point itself can’t be found on any map of the body, because it’s where the maps are drawn from.

Readers of Raymond Ruyer will hear something familiar here, and the echo isn’t accidental to my project. Ruyer’s survol absolu, the absolute survey by which a form possesses itself without standing at a distance from itself, is doing later and more metaphysically ambitious work on the same datum Stein isolates in 1916: that self-presence isn’t one more spatial relation among the others. In my dissertation, I’m arguing that this convergence… Stein’s non-localizable zero point, Ruyer’s survey without distance, Merleau-Ponty’s body schema… marks out the phenomenon that any account of the organism as a center of its own life has to save.

Stein then adds the fold that makes intersubjectivity, and I’d argue ecology, possible at all:

“But the living body is constituted in a two-fold manner as a sensed (bodily perceived) living body and as an outwardly perceived physical body of the outer world.” (Stein, 2016)

I’m given to myself doubly: from inside as Leib, from outside as Körper. And it’s this doubleness in my own case that lets empathy do its work in the foreign case. When I perceive another living body, I don’t see Körper and then add soul by hypothesis. The other’s body is given as the outer face of a Leib, surrounding a zero point of orientation I can orient toward but never occupy. There’s another here over there. Stein is careful about how far this reaches. The fullness of empathic givenness varies with type: another human body fulfills the empathic intention most completely, and as she moves through the animal kindom, the fulfillment thins by degrees without simply switching off. She’s cautious. Her caution is part of why I trust her.

One more annotation from this morning, because it points forward to so much she wrote later:

“Our uniform, isolated stream of consciousness is not our soul. But, as we already saw in examining inner perception, among our experiences there is one basic experience given to us which, together with its persistent attributes, becomes apparent in our experiences as the identical ‘bearer’ of them. This is the substantial soul.” (Stein, 2016)

In 1916 this is a phenomenological claim: the soul shows up in experience as the persistent bearer of experience, and it can’t be dissolved into the stream. But it’s also the seed of the whole later metaphysics. The Potency and Act habilitation material, the ascent of Finite and Eternal Being, the anthropology of person and spirit… all of it grows from this early refusal to let the soul be an inference or a construction. She found it given. She spent the rest of her life asking what kind of reality could be given like that, and what kind of ground such a reality requires.

Ecological Intentionality, or Stretching the Act

My dissertation asks a question Stein didn’t ask, using instruments she built. If empathy is the act in which another zero point of orientation announces itself in my field, how far does the act stretch, and under what discipline? The black walnut in my backyard is the test case I keep returning to, here and at Carolina Ecology, because it resists both easy answers. On a strict reading of the treatise, the walnut gives me Körper only: bark, ragged August leaves, green hulls hardening toward fall. It has no face, no expressive field of the kind Stein analyzes. And yet the tree is unmistakably a center of its own life… drawing water on its own schedule, timing its year to light I don’t perceive, defending its ground chemically through juglone against competitors it will never see. It maintains itself as a unity from within, which is exactly what a merely physical body doesn’t do.

What I’m calling ecological intentionality is the disciplined extension of the empathic act toward such centers: chastened by Stein’s own warnings about fading fulfillment, trained by long observation in a particular place, and refusing at every step the projection she ruled out in her critique of Lipps. The claim isn’t that the walnut has experiences like mine and I can feel them. The claim is that the walnut is given to disciplined perception as self-organizing, as an ἐντελέχεια in the Aristotelian sense (being-at-work-staying-itself), a form in act that is the source of its own norms… what counts as flourishing for it, what counts as injury. This is where the dissertation’s Aristotelian thread meets its phenomenological one: the organism grounds ecological normativity only as form-in-act, and Stein and Ruyer are my route from Aristotle to a method that can actually perceive such forms rather than positing them.

And this is why I keep insisting, in the Thomas Berry and Lanham form of the public writing, that perception precedes ethics. We can’t be argued into caring for what we’ve never actually perceived as living. Environmental ethics that skips the phenomenology of perception builds on sand, issuing obligations toward entities it has given us no way to encounter. Stein supplies what that literature is missing: a rigorous account of the act in which another center of life becomes present to me at all. She gives the phenomenology of the thing that ecotheologians urge through practice.

From Empathy to the Cross

Her feast asks us to hold the whole life together, and the whole life runs from Freiburg to Auschwitz. She read Teresa of Ávila’s autobiography through a single night in the summer of 1921 and closed it, saying she’d found the truth. Baptism took place on January 1, 1922, in Cologne, at the Cologne Carmel. In 1933, the same year the race laws ended her teaching, her sister Rosa followed her into the church in 1936. The manuscript of Kreuzeswissenschaft was unfinished on her desk when the SS came to the Echt convent on August 2, 1942, in reprisal for the Dutch bishops’ public protest of the deportations. She and Rosa died a week later. The church calls her a martyr, μάρτυς, which is simply the Koine word for witness (lexical form μάρτυς, μάρτυρος): one whose perception of the truth was so complete that her body was conscripted into the testimony.

I don’t read the conversion as a break with the dissertation. Empathy, remember, is the givenness of what remains irreducibly other, presence across a distance that isn’t abolished. That’s already a proto-theology of revelation, and I suspect she knew it. In The Science of the Cross she writes that a science becomes a science of the cross when the mystery of the cross becomes its inner form, a living energy shaping the soul by what it receives. The Ecology of the Cross borrows that architecture deliberately: knowledge of the living world whose inner form is kenosis (κένωσις, from κενόω, to empty; the textual form ἐκένωσεν at Philippians 2:7), knowledge shaped by what it receives rather than by what it seizes. And the one place Paul lets creation itself speak, it speaks in empathy’s grammar. Romans 8:22: πᾶσα ἡ κτίσις συστενάζει καὶ συνωδίνει ἄχρι τοῦ νῦν… all creation groans together and labors together until now (the textual forms συστενάζει and συνωδίνει, from the lexical συστενάζω and συνωδίνω). The prefix σύν carries the argument. Paul is claiming that creation has an inner life that can be suffered alongside, and Stein, decades before her conversion, was building the philosophical instrument that makes such a claim more than poetry.

Why This Book Matters to Me

Finite and Eternal Being gives my project its metaphysical scaffolding, and The Science of the Cross gives it its spiritual form, but On the Problem of Empathy gives it its method. Everything I’m attempting depends on the possibility this dissertation establishes: that another center of life can be genuinely given to me without being reduced to me, that the distance between us is crossed without being erased, that perception can be trained toward such givenness. A twenty-five-year-old doctoral student worked that out in Freiburg in 1916, and then spent twenty-six years living into its furthest implication… that to perceive the truth fully is to be claimed by it, all the way to the end. The end was this day. The church is right to call it a birth.

Quotes from Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy (The Collected Works of Edith Stein, Book 3). Translated by Waltraut Stein. ICS Publications, 2016. See also Finite and Eternal Being (CWES 9, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt) and The Science of the Cross (CWES 6, trans. Josephine Koeppel), both ICS Publications.

Neanderthal Rock Crystals

I find this sort of thing so fascinating and hope we continue exploring this interplay between ancient humans of various species…

Rock crystal scraper: 45,000-year-old Neanderthal tool that shows they had an ‘eye for beauty of form and color’ | Live Science:

A century ago, American archaeologists excavating at a cave site in France unearthed a cache of seven rock crystal tools made by Neanderthals. The discovery was one of the first to prove that Neanderthals were not the unintelligent brutes that many scientists of the time believed they were.

Interesting New Book on Assyria (and it’s a free pdf!)

I’ve just finished reading the intro so far, and I’m finding much to like in this new work by Jessie DeGrado on the interplay between the Assyrian empire(s) and ancient Israel, biblical texts, museum reception, and modern receptions. Neat framing in a decolonial context! I’ve been thinking of working on an updated and expanded Asia Has Claims Upon New England since it’s turning 20 (!!) this year as we continue to examine and re-examine our own lenses of history, theology, and cultural assumptions…

University Press of Colorado – Assyria’s Plunder:

Engaging texts from Israel and Judah, DeGrado refuses the usual framings of Biblical resistance to Assyrian despotism and asks instead why subject populations may have capitulated to Assyrian rule. Paired chapters consider specific Assyrian imperial practices and biblical texts that engage them. As the study moves from the awe-filled spectacle of Assyrian throne rooms to the Assyrian policy of deporting divine statues, Assyria’s Plunder centers the embodied experiences of those subjected to Assyrian hegemony. DeGrado also explores how the empire’s violence still holds sway in the popular imagination while Euro-American imperialism goes largely unacknowledged.

Drawing on decolonial studies alongside epigraphic and textual analysis, Assyria’s Plunder shows how critical historiography and theory can enrich historical analysis and provide a fuller portrait of Assyrian interaction with its client state.

12 Cedar Roses in South Carolina Poetry Anthology 2026

Excited to share that my poem 12 Cedar Roses was selected for the South Carolina Bards Poetry Anthology 2026. I wrote the poem for Merianna on our 12th anniversary, and the two ancient cedars it references are the ones I’m looking at now in our front yard right now. I debated on publishing this one originally, but glad that it’s found its own little life.

Love is not a bloom we hold, but the trees that keep making them.

Two Kinds of Wood

I got my first tattoo today, up in Asheville, thanks to the amazing folks at Thistle and Pearl. It’s a black walnut branch running up the inside of my forearm… the compound leaves fanning out the way they do in high summer here in our backyard… and standing beside the lowest of them, a plain cross.

Anyone who has read much of what I write knows I did not choose this arbitrarily. The black walnut in our backyard has been the patient anchor of nearly everything I’ve been doing the last few years, from my dissertation work to the poems to the long habit of walking out to look at one tree until it begins to look back. Juglans nigra is our current naming convention, thanks to Carl Linnaeus and his system of classification in the 1750s, which I taught so many middle schoolers about in my Life Science class. Even the Romans could not name it without reaching beyond the tree: Iovis glans, the nut of Jupiter; in Greek, Διὸς βάλανος (Diòs bálanos), the acorn of Zeus. They buried a god in the word.

The black walnut, for all that it has taught me and all of its beauty, is no gentle neighbor. It weeps juglone into the soil, quietly discouraging much of what tries to root beneath it… a tree that makes hard ground. I’ve spent the last few years trying to describe that paradox without flinching from either half of it… the tree that shelters and the same tree that suppresses, both inside of one beloved trunk.

Which is why the Cross has to stand beside it. The oldest witnesses did not always call it a Cross. Peter and the author of Luke/Acts called it a tree… ξύλον (xýlon), the plain word for a beam or a living trunk. “They killed him by hanging him on a tree,” ἐπὶ ξύλου (Acts 5:30).

So, there are two kinds of wood on my arm now, and beneath them really only one: the walnut that makes hard ground, and the ξύλον planted in the hardest ground of all, out of which, against every allelopathy, something green keeps insisting on coming up.

That is most of my work, carried out now where I can see it. Empathy before ethics, as I keep urging. The tree before the doctrine. And under both of them, in Piedmont red clay and Blue Ridge cove alike, the stubborn Carolina rumor of a resurrection.

I’m heading back to Thistle and Pearl shortly to complete the final piece with a quote from Edith Stein’s work: “My longing for truth was a single prayer” to complete my own journey through life and on the way to this PhD!