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Empathy Before Ethics (or Why We Should All Read More Edith Stein)

Empathy is one of those words that risks being worn thin by overuse and is too frequently misunderstood. It shows up everywhere now… in leadership manuals, in political rhetoric, in the well-meaning exhortations we give children and congregations. And yet, for all its familiarity, empathy remains deeply misunderstood. Too often it is reduced to a moral sentiment, a kind of emotional niceness, or worse, a strategy for persuasion. I want to suggest something quieter and more demanding… empathy as a way of perceiving.

“Empathy is the experience of foreign consciousness in general.”

Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (ICS Publications), p. 11

I have come to think of empathy not primarily as an ethical achievement but as an ontological posture. It is not something we do after we have already decided what matters. It is the manner in which the world first comes to matter at all.

This conviction has been sharpened for me through sustained engagement with Edith Stein, whose phenomenology of empathy remains one of the most careful and restrained accounts we have. For Stein, empathy is neither emotional contagion, weakness, nor imaginative projection. It is the act through which another subject’s experience is given to me as theirs, not mine. Empathy discloses interiority without collapsing difference. It is, from the start, a mode of knowing that preserves distance.

“The empathized experience is not given to me originally, but non-originally.”

Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, p. 7

In my own work, empathy names the fragile, attentive space where another presence addresses us before we categorize it, manage it, or explain it away. This is as true of human encounters as of encounters with trees, landscapes, animals, or histories. Empathy is the discipline of allowing oneself to be interrupted.

That interruption is rarely dramatic. Most often, it happens slowly, almost imperceptibly. A pause before speaking. A hesitation before naming. A sense that what is before me exceeds my grasp. In that pause, empathy is born… not as fusion or projection, but as restraint.

One of the mistakes modern culture makes is assuming that empathy means feeling what another feels. That framing subtly centers the self. It asks how the other’s experience can be translated into my own emotional register. Stein is especially helpful here. She insists that empathy is a non-original experience… I do not live the other’s joy or suffering as my own, but I genuinely encounter it as real. This distinction matters. It protects the other from appropriation and the self from illusion.

“The subject of the empathized experience is not identical with the subject who empathizes.”

Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, p. 10

This has profound implications for how we relate to the more-than-human world. When I sit with a tree… especially the black walnut that has quietly shaped my days over the past year… empathy does not mean imagining what it would be like to be a tree. That is a category error. Instead, empathy means allowing the tree to show up as something other than a resource, a metaphor, or a background object. It means attending to its rhythms, its vulnerabilities, its way of occupying time.

Here, Stein’s work opens a door rather than closing one. If empathy is the basic way another’s interiority becomes perceptible without being reduced, then the question is not whether nonhuman beings “have” interiority in a human sense. The question is whether we have trained ourselves to attend to modes of presence that do not mirror our own. Empathy, in this sense, is ecological. It resists extraction. It slows us down. It teaches us how to dwell rather than dominate.

“Empathy gives us experience of other persons and of their experiences, but it does not make them our own.”

Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, p. 12

I have found that empathy is also inseparable from humility. It requires accepting that understanding is always partial, always provisional. Stein never treats empathy as exhaustive knowledge. It is an opening, not a possession. This is uncomfortable in a culture that prizes mastery and certainty. Empathy refuses shortcuts. It cannot be automated or optimized. It unfolds through presence, patience, and a willingness to remain with what does not resolve.

This is why empathy cannot be commanded. It cannot be forced through moral exhortation alone. It must be cultivated through practices of attention… through walking familiar paths slowly, through listening without rehearsing replies, through learning the names and habits of the places we inhabit. Empathy grows where curiosity is protected.

And perhaps this is the most important thing I have learned. Empathy is not a soft virtue. It is a demanding discipline. It asks us to remain open in a world that rewards closure. It asks us to stay porous when efficiency would prefer boundaries sealed tight. It asks us to receive before we judge.

“It is only through empathy that we gain knowledge of the psychic life of others.”

Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, p. 14

If there is a future worth hoping for… ecologically, socially, spiritually… it will not be engineered solely through better systems or smarter technologies. It will be shaped by the recovery of this ancient, fragile capacity to be addressed by what is not ourselves.

Empathy does not solve the world’s problems. But without it, we cannot even perceive them rightly.

“Finite knowing is essentially fragmentary.”

Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, trans. Kurt Reinhardt (ICS Publications), p. 389

After the Crossroads: Artificial Intelligence, Place-Based Ethics, and the Slow Work of Moral Discernment

Over the past year, I’ve been tracking a question that began with a simple observation: Artificial intelligence isn’t only code or computation, but it’s infrastructure. It eats electricity and water. It sits on land. It reshapes local economies and local ecologies. It arrives through planning commissions and energy grids rather than through philosophical conference rooms.

That observation was the starting point of my November 2025 piece, “Artificial Intelligence at the Crossroads of Science, Ethics, and Spirituality.” In that first essay, I tried to draw out the scale of the stakes from the often-invisible material costs of AI, the ethical lacunae in policy debates, and the deep metaphysical questions we’re forced to confront when we start to think about artificial “intelligence” not as an abstraction but as an embodied presence in our world. If you haven’t read it yet, I would recommend it first as it provides the grounding that makes the new essay more than just a sequel.

Here’s the extended follow-up titled “After the Crossroads: Artificial Intelligence, Place-Based Ethics, and the Slow Work of Moral Discernment.” This piece expands the argument in several directions, and, I hope, deepens it.

If the first piece asked “What is AI doing here?”, this new essay asks “How do we respond, ethically and spiritually, when AI is no longer just a future possibility but a present reality?”

A few key parts:

1. From Abstraction to Emplacement

AI isn’t floating in the cloud, but it’s rooted in specific places with particular water tables, zoning laws, and bodies of people. Understanding AI ethically means understanding how it enters lived space, not just conceptual space.

2. Infrastructure as Moral Problem

The paper foregrounds the material aspects of AI, including data centers, energy grids, and water use, and treats these not as technical issues but as moral and ecological issues that call for ethical attention and political engagement.

3. A Theological Perspective on Governance

Drawing on ecological theology, liberation theology, and phenomenology, the essay reframes governance not as bureaucracy but as a moral practice. Decisions about land use, utilities, and community welfare become questions of justice, care, and collective responsibility.

4. Faith Communities as Ethical Agents

One of my central claims is that faith communities, including churches, are uniquely positioned to foster the moral formation necessary for ethical engagement with AI. These are communities in which practices of attention, patience, deliberation, and shared responsibility are cultivated through the ordinary rhythms of life (ideally).

This perspective is neither technophobic nor naïvely optimistic about innovation. It insists that ethical engagement with AI must be slow, embodied, and rooted in particular communities, not divorced into abstract principles.

Why This Matters Now

AI is no longer on the horizon. Its infrastructure is being built today, in places like ours (especially here in the Carolinas), with very material ecological footprints. These developments raise moral questions not only about algorithmic bias or job displacement, important as those topics are, but also about water tables, electrical grids, local economies, and democratic agency.

Those are questions not just for experts, but for communities, congregations, local governments, and engaged citizens.

This essay is written for anyone who wants to take those questions seriously without losing their grip on complexity, such as people of faith, people of conscience, and anyone concerned with how technology shapes places and lives.

I’m also planning shorter, reader-friendly versions of key sections, including one you can share with your congregation or community group.

We’re living in a time when theological attention and civic care overlap in real places, and it matters how we show up.

Abstract

This essay extends my earlier analysis of artificial intelligence (AI) as a convergence of science, ethics, and spirituality by deliberately turning toward questions of place, local governance, and moral formation. While much contemporary discourse on AI remains abstract or global in scale, the material realities of AI infrastructure increasingly manifest at the local level through data centers, energy demands, water use, zoning decisions, and environmental impacts. Drawing on ecological theology, phenomenology, and political theology, this essay argues that meaningful ethical engagement with AI requires slowing technological decision-making, recentering embodied and communal discernment, and reclaiming local democratic and spiritual practices as sites of moral agency. Rather than framing AI as either salvific or catastrophic, I propose understanding AI as a mirror that amplifies existing patterns of extraction, care, and neglect. The essay concludes by suggesting that faith communities and local institutions play a crucial, underexplored role in shaping AI’s trajectory through practices of attentiveness, accountability, and place-based moral reasoning.

After_the_Crossroads_AI_Place_Ethics_v2Download

On the Road This February: Conferences, Conversations, and the Work of Hospitality and Memory

This February, I’m grateful to be part of several overlapping scholarly conversations that sit at the intersection of ecology, theology, history, and art. Each of these gatherings asks, in different ways, how we learn to see more carefully… how we remember more truthfully and how our intellectual work might cultivate forms of attentiveness that matter beyond the academy.

Below are brief introductions to each conference, along with the abstracts for the papers I’ll be presenting.

“And Who Is My Neighbor?”

Refuge, Sanctuary, and Representation in Modern Art and Visual Culture
ASCHA Symposium | Chicago | February 17

I’ll be presenting at a symposium sponsored by the Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art and DePaul University, focused on questions of hospitality, displacement, sanctuary, and visual representation in modern and contemporary art.

This gathering brings together scholars working across art history, theology, and cultural studies to think seriously about how images shape moral imagination in times of migration, precarity, and contested belonging.

🔗 Event details

Paper title:

Ecologies of Refuge: Trees, Crosses, and the Art of Neighborliness

Abstract:

This paper examines how modern and contemporary visual culture has drawn upon arboreal imagery, cruciform forms, and ecological motifs to reimagine practices of refuge and neighbor-love. Moving beyond abstract moral discourse, I argue that certain artistic engagements with trees and landscapes function as ecological mediators of hospitality, inviting viewers into forms of attention shaped by vulnerability, shelter, and shared creaturely dependence. By situating these works within broader Christian traditions, the work of Edith Stein, and the cross and the tree of life, the paper explores how visual art can cultivate an ethic of neighborliness grounded not in sentimental inclusion but in materially rooted practices of care amid displacement and environmental instability.

Return to the Roots: How We Move Forward

10th Annual Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology
Yale Divinity School | New Haven | February 20

Just a few days later, I’ll be in New Haven for the 10th annual Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology at Yale Divinity School. This year’s theme invites participants to think carefully about what it means to return to roots… not as nostalgia, but as a disciplined attentiveness to the conditions that sustain life, meaning, and responsibility.

🔗 Event details and RSVP

Paper title:

Learning to Be Addressed by Trees: Ecological Intentionality and the Practice of Attention

Abstract:

This paper develops the concept of ecological intentionality as a phenomenological framework for rethinking human relationships with the more-than-human world. Drawing on extended practices of field observation and tree-tracking, alongside phenomenological and process-relational thought, I argue that trees do not merely appear as objects of perception or symbols of ecological concern, but as addressing presences that shape how attention itself is formed. Returning to roots, in this sense, becomes a practice of learning how to be addressed by nonhuman life, allowing ecological encounter to reconfigure theological categories of agency, responsibility, and care.

Eternity in Time: Thinking with the Church through History

Christendom College History Conference
Front Royal, Virginia | February 20–21

At nearly the same moment (and a short drive down I-81), I’ll also be participating in the annual history conference hosted by the History Department at Christendom College. This year’s theme focuses on how historical thinking shapes the Church’s capacity to inhabit time faithfully… resisting abstraction while remaining open to transcendence.

🔗 Conference information

Paper title:

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

Abstract:

This paper advances a Steinian reimagining of Church history as an empathic and ecological practice. Pope Francis’ recent call for a renewed study of history, one that resists “angelic conceptions” of the Church, opens the door to approaches that refuse abstraction in favor of embeddedness, vulnerability, and creaturely specificity. Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy, I argue, offers a methodological key for such a renewal. For Stein, genuine understanding arises not from detached analysis but from entering the lived interiority of the other, while still honoring alterity. When extended beyond the human, this empathic posture becomes a way of perceiving the Church’s history as a densely interdependent field in which human, nonhuman, and material actors co-constitute the conditions of its unfolding.

By bringing Stein into conversation with Hildegard’s viriditas, Leonardo Boff’s integral ecology, and my own work on ecological intentionality, the paper shows how Catholic historical consciousness can move beyond mere chronology toward what might be called ecological memory: an attunement to the more-than-human agencies, landscapes, and losses that have shaped the Church’s liturgy, art, mission, and doctrinal development. Case studies drawn from nineteenth-century missiology and the West’s encounter with Assyrian antiquities illustrate the costs of historical narratives that bracket ecological entanglement.

I contend that a Stein-inspired, ecologically thick historiography can form Catholic scholars, seminarians, and educators capable of embodying the ethical responsibility that Francis names, marked not by triumphalism but by cruciform solidarity with all beings across time. Such an approach reframes history not merely as what the Church remembers, but as how the Church learns to inhabit the world with humility, depth, and renewed evangelical imagination.

At first glance, these conferences may seem to occupy different disciplinary spaces… art history, ecology, theology, historiography. But for me, they converge around a shared concern: how we learn to see, remember, and respond within worlds that exceed us.

I’m grateful for the chance to think alongside colleagues in each of these settings, and I look forward to sharing reflections here as these conversations continue to unfold.

Ecological Intentionality and the Depth of Being

Over the past several years, much of my academic and spiritual work has been circling a single question… not first of ethics or policy, but of perception.

How does the world show up to us in the first place?

Contemporary ecological crises are often framed as failures of knowledge, governance, or technology. Those failures are real. But they rest on something deeper and more habitual: the ways we are trained to perceive the more-than-human world as background, resource, or raw material rather than as something that addresses us, resists us, and exceeds us.

The paper I’m sharing here, “Ecological Intentionality and the Depth of Being,” is an attempt to think carefully at that deeper level. It asks how consciousness discloses the natural world as meaningful… and whether that meaning is merely projected by us or grounded in the being of things themselves  .

At the center of the paper is the concept of ecological intentionality. By this I mean the structure of consciousness through which the world appears not as neutral matter but as relational, expressive, and worthy of regard. Ecological intentionality is not an ethical stance layered on top of perception. It names the perceptual and metaphysical conditions that make ethical concern possible at all.

Philosophically, the paper stages a slow dialogue between two thinkers who are rarely brought into sustained conversation.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty helps us see how perception is not passive reception or conceptual construction, but an embodied openness to a world that already carries meaning. The body does not stand over against nature as a detached observer. It inhabits a lived field in which landscapes, paths, animals, and places solicit response, invite movement, and resist reduction.

Edith Stein, working from within the phenomenological tradition but refusing to stop at description alone, insists that what appears in experience corresponds to a real ontological depth. Finite beings are not exhausted by how they show up to us. They participate in being analogically, possessing integrity, essence, and contingency that are not conferred by human attention.

Held together, these two approaches allow ecological intentionality to be articulated as both phenomenological and metaphysical. The world appears as meaningful because it is meaningful… not because meaning is imposed upon it.

A key thread running through the paper is Stein’s account of empathy, understood not as emotional projection but as a disciplined mode of access to another center of being. While Stein develops empathy primarily in interpersonal terms, the structure she describes opens a way of encountering non-human life as possessing its own depth and integrity without collapsing difference or resorting to anthropomorphism. Empathy, in this sense, becomes an ontological posture rather than a sentiment.

This matters for ecological thought because it shifts the conversation away from mastery and toward recognition. If beings exceed our grasp, then perception itself must be reformed. Ecological intentionality names that reformation… a way of perceiving that is open, restrained, and attentive to finitude.

The paper does not offer an environmental ethic, a policy proposal, or a theological program. Instead, it tries to clarify the philosophical ground on which such projects stand. Before we decide how to act toward the world, we must first learn how to be addressed by it.

I’m sharing the paper here as part of an ongoing line of work that I’ve been calling phenomenological theology and spiritual ecology, and as a contribution to a larger project (my dissertation) titled Ecology of the Cross. I hope it proves useful to those thinking at the intersection of phenomenology, metaphysics, theology, and ecological concern… and I welcome slow, careful conversation around it.

You can read the full paper here:

Ecological Intentionality and Depth of Being PublicDownload

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listening and Intentionality

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

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

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

Listening Beyond the Human

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

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

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

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

Theological Stakes

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

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

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

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

Listening as Practice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why This Matters Now

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

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

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

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

SciFi Predictions

Fun read here for fans of science fiction like myself…

Among the Prophets | Nicholas Russell:

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

Daimons, Demons, and Discernment

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

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

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

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

Was “demonic” language really a regression?

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

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

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

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

Daimons were never monsters

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

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

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

Pasulka and technological mysticism

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

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

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

The daimonic as a stance, not an ontology

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

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

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

Slowing down instead of swinging wildly

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

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

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

Stats from 2025

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

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

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

Christian Wiman, Consciousness, and Learning How to Listen Again

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

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

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

Consciousness Beyond the Skull

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

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

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

Physics, Poetics, and the Shape of Attention

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

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

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

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

God Without Final Answers

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

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

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

Ecology as a Practice of Listening

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

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

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

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

Listening as Theological Method

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

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

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

Early Mathematical Thinking

I have a hunch mathematical thinking goes waaaayyy back into our human (and more-than-human) ancestry…

Ancient Pottery Shows Humans Were Doing Math 3,000 Years Before Numbers Existed – The Debrief:

Long before humans carved numbers into clay tablets or scratched equations onto stone, people in the ancient Near East were already dividing space, counting patterns, and thinking in mathematical sequences—without ever writing a single numeral.

Evidence for this surprisingly prehistoric mathematical thinking doesn’t come from proto-calculators or tally sticks, but from something far more familiar: pottery.

Curiosity and Empathy Aren’t Bad: What Leonardo da Vinci Can Teach Us

Leonardo da Vinci is often treated as the emblem of genius, the Renaissance mind par excellence. And yet, late in life, Leonardo regarded himself as something of a failure (a point that gets picked up a good deal in mainstream articles about him these days). He believed he had not finished enough, not delivered enough, not brought his restless investigations to proper completion, as in this post I read this morning, Why Da Vinci Thought He Was a Failure, The Culturist.

Obviously, this feels almost absurd. How could someone whose work reshaped art, anatomy, engineering, and natural observation judge himself so harshly… The Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, having a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle named after you (also my favorite one)? But if we approach Leonardo phenomenologically, attending not to outcomes but to lived experience, his dissatisfaction begins to make a different kind of sense.

What Leonardo struggled with was not a lack of talent or discipline, but the burden of curiosity itself.

Curiosity as a Way of Being

Leonardo’s notebooks reveal a mind endlessly drawn outward. I suffer similar tendencies, and the notebooks that I’ve meticulously kept since around 2010 would probably testify to that for an outside reader. He observed water curling around obstacles, birds banking in flight, muscles tightening beneath skin, and light diffusing through air. These observations were not collected for a single project. They were acts of sustained attention to the world as it presented itself.

Curiosity, for Leonardo, was not an instrument aimed at mastery. It was an orientation toward phenomena, a continual turning of the self toward whatever appeared. In phenomenological terms, this resembles intentionality, the basic structure of consciousness as always being consciousness of something that we find in Edmund Husserl’s Ideas I (PDF here).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty later argued that perception itself is a bodily engagement with the world rather than a detached mental representation (Phenomenology of Perception… dense but one of my fav works that should be more read these days!). Leonardo seems to have intuited this centuries earlier. His curiosity was embodied, sensory, and relational. He learned by lingering, sketching, returning, and allowing phenomena to resist easy explanation.

From this perspective, curiosity is not a trait one possesses. It is a way of inhabiting the world.

Why Curiosity Can Feel Like Failure

Leonardo’s sense of failure arose precisely because this mode of being does not align well with cultures of completion. He moved slowly, followed questions wherever they led, and often abandoned works when new phenomena called for his attention. Patrons expected finished paintings. Leonardo found himself perpetually unfinished. I often feel the same!

Phenomenologically speaking, this tension reflects a clash between two temporalities. One is the linear time of production and achievement. The other is the lived time of attention, where meaning unfolds through repeated encounters and deepening perception.

Leonardo lived primarily in the second. What looks like failure from the outside can, from within, be fidelity to experience. To remain curious is to resist closure. It is to stay with the world longer than efficiency allows. It’s certainly a curse on one level and we often treat it with pharmaceutical medication these days… but it’s also a blessing or superpower, depending on your persuasion.

Empathy as Curiosity Turned Relational

Leonardo’s curiosity did not stop at nature or mechanics. It extended deeply into human expression. His drawings and paintings reveal a remarkable sensitivity to gesture, posture, and facial expression. He did not simply depict bodies. He rendered states of being.

This is where curiosity becomes empathy.

Phenomenologically, empathy is not projection or emotional contagion. Edith Stein describes it as a way of accessing another’s experience while preserving their otherness (Stein, On the Problem of Empathy PDF, which should be required reading in all colleges and universities, if not in high schools). Empathy begins with curiosity, with the willingness to attend to another without collapsing them into our own expectations.

Leonardo’s art practices this attentiveness. His figures invite us to linger with them, to sense the interiority suggested by an angle of the head or a softness around the eyes. He does not explain them. He lets them be encountered.

This pairing of curiosity and empathy is essential. Curiosity without empathy becomes extractive. Empathy without curiosity becomes sentimental. Together, they form a disciplined openness to reality as it shows itself.

Curiosity Beyond the Human

Leonardo’s curiosity was also ecological, long before the term existed. He did not treat nature as inert matter to be controlled. Water had character. Air had movement. Plants and animals exhibited their own intelligences.

This resonates strongly with phenomenological approaches to ecology, where attention is given not only to systems but to lived encounters with the more-than-human world. To observe a tree across seasons, or to watch how rain alters the texture of soil, is not merely to gather data. It is to practice a form of relational knowing grounded in care.

Curiosity, in this sense, is ethical before it is theoretical. It teaches us how to stay with what exceeds us.

Real Being as Attentive Presence

Leonardo’s evident dissatisfaction with his life’s output may say less about his achievements and more about the cost of living attentively in a world that rewards closure. His life suggests that real being does not consist in finishing everything we begin, but in remaining responsive to what continually addresses us.

Curiosity keeps us open. Empathy keeps us responsible.

Together, they shape a way of being that is not centered on control or accumulation, but on presence, participation, and care. If Leonardo indeed felt like a failure, perhaps it was because he measured himself by standards that could never capture the depth of his engagement with the world.

Phenomenology invites us to reconsider those standards. It asks not what we have produced, but how we have learned to see, to listen, and to remain with what is given.

In that light, curiosity and empathy are not distractions from real being. They are its conditions.

Harrelson Holiday Letter 2025

Here’s our annual family letter, which we send out during Christmastide. I want to add that I thank each and every one of you who subscribe to my blog. I’ve been posting intermittently since around 2003. Over the past year, views and engagement have grown exponentially, and this is by far the biggest year I’ve ever seen in terms of numbers (will post numbers shortly) as I continue my PhD studies in Ecology and Religion. I’m humbled by the supportive responses, emails, and direct messages I’ve received in 2025. Thank you for your encouragement if you’ve reached out or read a post or two! Here’s to a magical 2026 for us all 🪄

Harrelson Holiday Letter 2025Download

Here’s to the Squirrels

My former students and those who know me well know that I love squirrels. I had two pet squirrels (Chip and Dale) throughout my childhood after we found their fallen nest in the Hurricane Hugo cleanup at our home in rural South Carolina. They lived a long and happy life inside (my Mom and Dad were beyond understanding to say the least), and were mostly tame as squirrels go (though now I would caution anyone about trying to domesticate eastern grey squirrels even from an infant stage!). I have a robust collection of squirrel figurines, toys, handmade crafts, and paintings from students that adorn my office space (and I’m actually wearing an e=mcSquirrel shirt today that a student gifted me years ago).

Most prominent is a large squirrel plushie, given by a student in my first year of teaching way back in 2002, named Maxwell (after the physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who helped us understand electromagnetics), which played a prominent role in countless physics demonstrations in every classroom I was fortunate enough to occupy over the years and many of my favorite students have signed with Sharpie over the years.

Outside on our front porch is a rather large concrete statue of a squirrel nibbling on an acorn that weighs too much for me to move, and my children like to think of it as a deity to our plethora of squirrel neighbors (who I scatter nuts and feed for every morning, especially in these colder months) that cohabit the land we live on now in the Piedmont of the Blue Ridge Mountains. 

All that to say, I’m not sure why the squirrel became my spirit animal, but here we are. 

Wonderful little podcast episode here… 

Squirrels can find 85% of the nuts they hide | Popular Science:

Every fall, squirrels stash thousands of nuts and other snacks in preparation for winter. For our fluffy-tailed friends, survival depends on being able to locate these food stores months later. So, how do they do it? In this episode of Ask Us Anything, we talk about the skills squirrels use to find their food and debunk a common misconception about how many nuts they lose.

Elon Musk’s Intent by Substituting Abundance for Sustainable in Telsa’s Mission

Worthy read on Elon’s post-scarcity fantasy of robots and AGI that relies on the concepts of Superintelligence and trans-humanistic ethics that lack any concept of ecological futures and considerations… a future that, quite frankly, we should not pursue if we are to live into our true being here on this planet.

Elon Musk drops ‘sustainable’ from Tesla’s mission as he completes his villain arc | Electrek:

By removing “sustainable,” Tesla is signaling that its primary focus is no longer the environment or the climate crisis. “Amazing Abundance” is a reference to the post-scarcity future Musk believes he is building through general-purpose humanoid robots (Optimus) and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

In this new mission, electric cars and renewables are just tools to help build this hypothetical utopia.

Christmas Without Sentiment: Edith Stein and the God Who Enters Finitude

Every year, Christmas arrives already crowded.

Crowded with lights, crowded with music, crowded with Hallmark Channel movies, crowded with memory and expectation. Even those of us who love the feast time often feel a quiet pressure to feel something specific… joy, warmth, reassurance. Christmas often becomes a kind of emotional performance, even in the church.

As much as our modern nativity scenes of the incarnation of Jesus are a harmony of the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke (an ancient practice going back to the beginnings of Christian writings, as we see in Tatian’s Diatessaron discovered at my beloved Dura Europos in modern-day Syria in the 1930s) with shepherds, angels, magi and timber all mixing together in a crowded space, our own performances and expectations are a harmony of these accumulated cultural projections and perceived normative truths.

Edith Stein helps me breathe differently around Christmas.

Not because she writes sweetly about the nativity… she doesn’t. And not because she offers seasonal reflections in the usual sense. What she gives instead is something far more demanding and, to my mind, far more faithful with a way of understanding Christmas as an event of ontological descent… God entering finitude without rescue clauses.

Incarnation as Entry, Not Appearance

In Finite and Eternal Being, Stein’s central concern is the relationship between eternal being and finite being. Creation itself is already a kind of gift, but the Incarnation intensifies that gift to the point of vulnerability. God does not merely touch finitude from above. God enters it from within, accepting its conditions rather than suspending them (Finite and Eternal Being, 352–360).

This matters for how I think about Christmas and how we should engage with this event, individually and culturally (rather than ceding our engagement to capitalist corporate control).

The child in the manger is not a divine exception to creaturely life. The Christ child is not insulated from time, hunger, exposure, or risk as the Gospels make abundantly clear. Christmas, in Stein’s metaphysical imagination, is the moment when eternal being consents to be shaped by the rhythms of finite existence.

God learns time from the inside. That alone should unsettle most of our Christmas instincts.

Christmas Already Contains the Cross

Stein never allows Christmas to float free from Good Friday. In The Science of the Cross, written during the final years of her life, she describes Christ’s entire existence as a single movement of self-giving love that begins with Incarnation and culminates in total surrender (The Science of the Cross, 20–28).

From this perspective, Christmas is not a pause before suffering begins. It is the first step of suffering and ultimately redemption.

The infant’s vulnerability in the Gospels is not symbolic. It is real. Exposure is not delayed until Calvary. It begins in Bethlehem much as it does today, with the birth of Palestinian children facing so many challenges that they are not responsible for nor should have to inherit.

This is why Stein’s Christmas feels so unsentimental to me. There is no divine safety net quietly waiting backstage. God does not visit human life. God commits to it. Instead of asking “Mary Did You Know?” we should be asking “God, Did You Know?”

Empathy Taken All the Way Down

Years earlier, in On the Problem of Empathy, Stein defines empathy as a way of entering another’s experience without collapsing the distinction between self and other (On the Problem of Empathy, 10–18). Empathy is not projection. It is not imagination alone. It is a disciplined openness to being affected by another while remaining oneself, which is often opposed to modern conceptions of empathy.

When Stein later reflects on the Incarnation, it becomes impossible not to see it as empathy radicalized beyond psychology and into ontology itself.

Christmas is not God observing human life with perfect knowledge. It is God living a human life from within finite consciousness. God allows Godself to be addressed by the world.

As someone working through ecological intentionality, I find Stein quietly indispensable here. Christmas is not just about human salvation. It is about divine responsiveness to material reality… to bodies, to limits, to history.

Hiddenness, Not Spectacle

In Stein’s letters from her Carmelite years, Christmas appears quietly, almost in passing. What she emphasizes is not celebration but hiddenness. God enters the world unnoticed and is recognized only by those keeping watch (the magi and the shepherds, in their respective accounts in Matthew and Luke). Recognition requires attentiveness and intentionality rather than announcement.

My own practices of slow noticing by sitting with a black walnut tree in winter and throughout 2025, attending to bark and leaf litter and time without spectacle, have quietly taught me the value of this sort of intentionality.

Christmas, for Stein, is not loud. There is no grand culmination of Handel’s Messiah. Incarnation happens when no one is watching carefully enough.

Christmas After Auschwitz

It is impossible to read Stein’s later work without knowing how her life ends. A Jewish philosopher, a teacher, a Catholic Carmelite, and murdered at Auschwitz with hundreds of others on August 9, 1942. Christmas, read backward through that history, becomes unbearable if we expect it to function as reassurance.

Stein does not let it.

Christmas does not promise escape from historical suffering. It places God inside it. Eternal being does not hover safely above violence and loss. It enters conditions in which love can be rejected, destroyed, or silenced. That is not comforting in any shallow sense. But it is faithful.

Why I Return to Stein at Christmas

I return to Edith Stein in December because she will not let me sentimentalize the Incarnation. She reminds me that Christmas is not about divine power softened for human consumption. It is about divine vulnerability embraced without reserve.

God becomes finite. God becomes dependent. God is exposed to the elements of Creation as well as human frailty, cruelty, joy, and love.

And in doing so, finitude itself is no longer something to be escaped by rapture or an afterlife of harp playing in the clouds. It becomes the place where meaning happens.

Christmas, then, is not a break from the world’s grief. It is God’s decision to dwell within it and to be directly addressed by that grief. That is a hard truth. But it is also, quietly, a hopeful one… if we are willing to sit still long enough to let it speak.

South Carolina’s Data Center Decision Time

I have grave concerns about the speed at which this is happening all over the state, with little regard to integral ecologies (City Council is debating two new data centers here in Spartanburg as well)…

9 new data centers proposed in Colleton County:

“I think South Carolina really is at a decision point: what do we want our state to look like 20 years from now, 30 years from now?” resident and Climate Campaign Associate Robby Maynor said. “Do we want a lot of gas plants and pipelines and data centers? Or do we want to protect the things that make South Carolina special and unique? The ACE Basin is at the very top of that list. This is the absolute wrong location for a complex of this size.”

In the application for the special zoning exception, the proposed data centers and the substations show the potential impact on this land, especially the wetlands, but some say the impact is even greater.

Exciting News on the Family Front

Exciting news for Merianna and our family… so proud of her ministry and devotion to the spiritual direction of people (young and old!)…

Announcing our New Director of Youth and Family Ministry:

Dear FPC Youth, Families, and Congregation,

The Youth Director Search Committee is overjoyed to announce that Rev. Merianna Neely Harrelson has accepted the call to serve as our new Director of Youth and Family Ministry.

Merianna is a minister, teacher, spiritual director, and author with deep roots to Spartanburg. She was born and raised here and is a graduate of both the Spartanburg Day School and Furman University. After teaching overseas following college, she answered a call to ministry and received her Master of Divinity in Pastoral Studies from Gardner-Webb University.

What is Intelligence (and What “Superintelligence” Misses)?

Worth a read… sounds a good deal like what I’ve been saying out loud and thinking here in my posts on AI futures and the need for local imagination in steering technological innovation such as AI / AGI…

The Politics Of Superintelligence:

And beneath all of this, the environmental destruction accelerates as we continue to train large language models — a process that consumes enormous amounts of energy. When confronted with this ecological cost, AI companies point to hypothetical benefits, such as AGI solving climate change or optimizing energy systems. They use the future to justify the present, as though these speculative benefits should outweigh actual, ongoing damages. This temporal shell game, destroying the world to save it, would be comedic if the consequences weren’t so severe.

And just as it erodes the environment, AI also erodes democracy. Recommendation algorithms have long shaped political discourse, creating filter bubbles and amplifying extremism, but more recently, generative AI has flooded information spaces with synthetic content, making it impossible to distinguish truth from fabrication. The public sphere, the basis of democratic life, depends on people sharing enough common information to deliberate together….

What unites these diverse imaginaries — Indigenous data governance, worker-led data trusts, and Global South design projects — is a different understanding of intelligence itself. Rather than picturing intelligence as an abstract, disembodied capacity to optimize across all domains, they treat it as a relational and embodied capacity bound to specific contexts. They address real communities with real needs, not hypothetical humanity facing hypothetical machines. Precisely because they are grounded, they appear modest when set against the grandiosity of superintelligence, but existential risk makes every other concern look small by comparison. You can predict the ripostes: Why prioritize worker rights when work itself might soon disappear? Why consider environmental limits when AGI is imagined as capable of solving climate change on demand?

What If the Economy Was Modeled After Ecology?

I mean… this is pretty much what I do if they’d like to give me a call. 

What If the Economy Was Modeled After Ecology? – Longreads:

What if we thought of the American economy as an organism, rather than a machine? For Atmos, Christine Ro talks with John Fullerton, a former J.P. Morgan banker focused on regenerative economics—which, in simplest terms, is the idea that the economy is a living system. The founder of a paradigm-changing think tank, Fullerton tells Ro he’s not anti-capitalist, but instead wants to build an economy that’s resilient as a whole, optimizes different forms of capital beyond financial capital, and celebrates human creativity within a healthier and less monopolistic market. He also thinks financial institutions like banks could do a lot of good—but they won’t. Reading their conversation, I couldn’t help but think of everything I’ve learned in school over the decades—about Adam Smith, about GDP, about growth—and imagine a world where future generations begin their economic lessons under the guidance of ecology’s wisdom.