Blog

The Great Work Ahead of Us

Worth the time to read and process… The Great Work (to invoke Thomas Berry here) ahead of us is daunting. Still, we have the opportunity to create something where human and the more-than-human are encouraged not only to survive but to thrive (together), ultimately, if we only speak up… 

Is This Rock Bottom?:

So yes, the fights over SNAP, ACA subsidies, and shutdowns matter — but they’re symptoms, not causes. You don’t get 40 million people needing food aid and 100 million drowning in medical debt because of one bad president or one unlucky decade. You get there because the institutions that were supposed to protect the public spent decades serving somebody else.

An Ecology of the Cross Audio Reflection

Here’s my audio reflection on Marder’s thought technology of “The Ecology of Thought”… it’s a really powerful notion. This is from my regular tracking and tree-sit journal with a black walnut that I’ve grown to love and learn from daily.

Mullins Church Celebrates 250th Anniversary

I grew up in Mullins and attended Little Bethel Baptist down the street from Gapway Baptist, but have been to Gapway many times over the years (and my best friend Eric lived beside the church growing up, so we used the grounds as our staging area for Voltron and Transformer and He-Man adventures)… congrats on 250 years and here’s to the next 250!

‘A Blessing’: Mullins church celebrates 250th year during Homecoming service | WBTW:

Sunday’s service at the Gapway Baptist Church in Mullins looked a little different as worshippers celebrated 250 years of service and community.

The church was founded in 1775 and has continued to stand strong. On Sunday, lifelong members, new members and former members filled its pews for the homecoming service.

Boomer Ellipsis…

As a PhD student… I do a lot of writing. I love ellipses, especially in Canvas discussions with Professors and classmates as I near the finish line of my coursework. 

I’m also a younger Gen X’er / Early Millennial (born in ’78 but was heavily into tech and gaming from the mid-80’s because my parents were amazingly tech-forward despite us living in rural South Carolina). The “Boomer Ellipsis” take makes me very sad since I try not to use em dashes as much as possible now due to AI… and now I’m going to be called a boomer for using… ellipsis.

Let’s just all write more. Sigh. Here’s my obligatory old man dad emoji 👍

On em dashes and elipses – Doc Searls Weblog:

While we’re at it, there is also a “Boomer ellipsis” thing. Says here in the NY Post, “When typing a large paragraph, older adults might use what has been dubbed “Boomer ellipses” — multiple dots in a row also called suspension points — to separate ideas, unintentionally making messages more ominous or anxiety-inducing and irritating Gen Z.” (I assume Brooke Kato, who wrote that sentence, is not an AI, despite using em dashes.) There is more along the same line from Upworthy and NDTV.

On Whale Poop

I learned something new today…

Impact of baleen whales on ocean primary production across space and time | PNAS:

Whales have long been suggested to enhance ocean productivity by recycling essential nutrients, yet their quantitative impact on primary production has remained uncertain. Our study quantifies nutrient release via feces and urine by baleen whales in high-latitude feeding grounds and evaluates its impact on primary production using ecosystem models. Results indicate that whales enhance ocean productivity, particularly in offshore regions where nutrients are scarce, leading to cascading effects on the food web. These findings highlight the ecological importance of whale-mediated nutrient cycling and emphasize the role of whale populations in sustaining productive and resilient marine ecosystems.

Magnolias Over Ballrooms

I’d rather have a magnolia or most any vegetal kin over a ballroom to honor my memory, but that’s just me…

Trump Rips Out Presidents’ Historic Trees for New Ballroom:

Satellite imagery shows that six trees, including southern magnolias commemorating presidents Warren G. Harding and Franklin D. Roosevelt, were axed or removed from the White House grounds this week as Trump abruptly demolished the East Wing.

OpenAI’s Sky for Mac

This is going to be one of those acquisition moments we look back on in a few years (months?) and think “wow! that really changed the game!” sort of like when Google acquired Writely to make Google Docs…

OpenAI’s Sky for Mac wants to be your new work buddy and maybe your boss | Digital Trends:

So, OpenAI just snapped up a small company called Software Applications, Inc. These are the folks who were quietly building a really cool AI assistant for Mac computers called “Sky.”

Integral Plasma Ecology: Toward a Cosmological Theology of Energy and Relation

I’m talking about plasma and ecology a little more… there’s a lot here that needs to be explored.

Abstract

This paper develops the concept of Integral Plasma Ecology as a framework that bridges physics, cosmology, and ecological theology through a process-relational lens. Drawing from Alfred North Whitehead’s cosmology, Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary mysticism, and Thomas Berry’s integral ecology, I propose that plasma, the most abundant and least understood state of matter in the cosmos, can serve as a metaphysical and theological metaphor for participatory consciousness and relational ecology. My background in physics education informs this exploration, as I integrate scientific understandings of plasma’s dynamics with phenomenological and theological insights from Merleau-Ponty, Edith Stein, and Leonardo Boff. The result is a vision of reality as a living field of plasma-like relationality, charged with energy, consciousness, and divine creativity.

Continue reading Integral Plasma Ecology: Toward a Cosmological Theology of Energy and Relation

Connecting Churches with the Communities in Our Distracted Age

I don’t like the “consumers” language for ontological and theological reasons, but the intent is still helpful. He’s not wrong here… and it’s something that nonprofits and churches could learn as well if they want to get past the noise and have meaningful engagement with their communities.

Connecting with the Consumer in a Distracted Age | Yale Insights:

Consumers are overwhelmed a bit with the paradox of information available to them today. We’re in this environment where you have every song available on your phone yet there’s never anything to listen to. You have every show available on your TV, and there’s nothing to watch. You have every food available for delivery, and there’s nothing to eat.

So as brands are trying to reach these consumers with messages—when they have access to everything and often don’t pay attention to all the inbound messages—it’s hard to cut through.

Marketing That Happens is essentially the hack. It’s how you get people to engage. It involves taking your brand beyond the walls of paid media to leverage the power of earned media, organic social media, and creativity to create something interesting enough and relevant enough to talk about. Marketing That Happens is about a creative standard of higher engagement. It’s about people self-selecting and “opting in” to your brand’s content—and seeking it out themselves—because it’s interesting to them, given its context, cultural relevance, and the uniqueness of the core creative idea.

Prompt Injection Attacks and ChatGPT Atlas

Good points here by Simon Willison about the new ChatGPT Atlas browser from OpenAI…

Introducing ChatGPT Atlas:

I’d like to see a deep explanation of the steps Atlas takes to avoid prompt injection attacks. Right now it looks like the main defense is expecting the user to carefully watch what agent mode is doing at all times!

“Nightmare for College Students”

We were hit by the Canvas outage at CIIS… it’s amazing that I can have classes for my PhD work with students from around the world, but this is a stark reminder of how delicate those connections are when we rely on centralized technology/power/food production rather than having things local and distributed (as they should be, ultimately… such as solar power networks)…

The AWS Outage Was a Nightmare for College Students | WIRED:

But the disruptions to students are a testament to just how popular Canvas is on college campuses—and how much of modern educational life is increasingly centered on a handful of educational technology platforms.

Amazon’s Plans to Replace 500,000 Human Jobs With Robots

Speaking of AI… this isn’t only about warehouse jobs but will quickly ripple out to other employers (and employees)…

Amazon Plans to Replace More Than Half a Million Jobs With Robots – The New York Times:

Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its U.S. work force in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033. That would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon didn’t need to hire.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas Browser

Going to be interesting to see if their new browser picks up adoption in the mainstream and what new features it might have compared to others (I’ve tested out Opera and Perplexity’s AI browsers but couldn’t recommend at this point)… agentic browsing is definitely the new paradigm, though.

OpenAI is about to launch its new AI web browser, ChatGPT Atlas | The Verge:

Reuters reported in July that OpenAI was preparing to launch an AI web browser, with the company’s Operator AI agent built into the browser. Such a feature would allow Operator to book restaurant reservations, automatically fill out forms, and complete other browser actions.

12 Cedar Roses

For Merianna on our 12th Wedding Anniversary…

12 Cedar Roses

From the cedars in our yard,
I gathered what time had folded as
cones that had become blossoms,
spirals turning the world inward
like memory, like prayer.

12 cedar roses,
for twelve years that have ripened into ring and root.
Not perfect, no bloom is,
but resilient, fragrant with rain,
their brown petals open as if listening.

You, across the table,
the light falling through the window like grace,
half of our meal left untouched because we were talking again
about the kids, about work, about that wild dream
of a small school and church, or maybe just rest.

We have built this life
not from marble or vows,
but from mornings and errands,
from the long silence of growing beside one another,
like those cedars in our front yard,
their roots weaving underground,
trading water, sharing breath and the prayers of photosynthesis.

Each rose is a year we learned
to bend without breaking,
to find the sacred in the daily,
to let the seasons speak through us as
green, gold, bare, then green again.

When the wind moves through their branches tonight,
I will hear the rustle of your laughter,
the sound that still steadies me,
and I’ll remember:
Love is not a bloom we hold,
but the trees that keeps making them.

Sheldrake’s Lecture on Panentheism at St James Church

Sheldrake is one of my favorite thinkers and a huge inspiration for my own work. Great lecture here from my process theology meets medieval Christian theology point of view… well worth your time:

In this talk, Rupert Sheldrake explores panentheism—the idea that the divine is not separate from the world but present throughout it, while also transcending it. With the grip of mechanistic materialism loosening, Rupert invites us to reconsider how we see nature, mind, and spirit. Tracing a broad arc from ancient philosophies and Christian mysticism to AI-generated worldviews, panpsychism, and psychedelics, he reflects on how the sacred presence in nature—-long affirmed by spiritual traditions-—is re-emerging through science, experience, and renewed practices of attention.

This talk was recorded at St James Church, Piccadilly, a longstanding hub for open spiritual inquiry and progressive theology in the heart of London.

R.I.P. Phyllis Trible

One of those amazing thinkers and scholars who helped shape my own theological journey (first read her work as an Undergrad at Wofford College, and it both answered and provoked questions I had been and continue to wrestle with), along with countless others.

Her work on rhetorical criticism and the book of Jonah is still one of my favorites and a must-read.

Union Theological Seminary: In Memoriam: Dr. Phyllis Trible

Dr. Trible’s scholarship reshaped biblical studies, insisting that the academy and the church confront both the beauty and the brutality of our sacred texts.

Through groundbreaking works—including God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality and Texts of Terror—she taught generations to read with literary rigor, ethical clarity, and courageous empathy. Her method of close rhetorical reading opened space for women and other marginalized people long silenced by interpretive traditions, and her teaching formed scholars, pastors, and activists who carry her insights into pulpits, classrooms, and movements for justice around the world.

John as the Fourth Synpotic Gospel?

Great podcast episode here with the incredible Helen Bond and the always insightful Mark Goodacre, who may or may not have been a listener of Thinking Religion in the Thomas Whitley era…

Since the mid-twentieth century, it has been routine for scholars to see John as independent of the Synoptics – Matthew, Mark and Luke. Yet a recent book by Professor Mark Goodacre suggests that John should be read as the fourth and final ‘Synoptic’ gospel which knew and used all of the Synoptics. Join Helen and Lloyd in the Biblical Time Machine as they explore Goodacre’s case. Learn about John’s dramatic transformation of the Synoptics, the way his Gospel ‘presupposes’ the earlier texts, and the payoff of Goodacre’s argument for John’s authorship and date. 

 is Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins in the Religious Studies Department at Duke University, North Carolina. He is the author of the classic volumes: The Case Against Q (2002) and Thomas and the Gospels (2012). His most recent book, fresh off the press, is  (Eerdmans, 2025),