Ecotheology Archives - Sam Harrelson

Gigawatts and Wisdom: Toward an Ecological Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

Elon Musk announced on X this week that xAI’s “Colossus 2” supercomputer is now operational, describing it as the world’s first gigawatt-scale AI training cluster, with plans to scale to 1.5 gigawatts by April. This single training cluster now consumes more electricity than San Francisco’s peak demand.

There is a particular cadence to announcements like this. They arrive wrapped in the language of inevitability, scale, and achievement. Bigger numbers are offered as evidence of progress. Power becomes proof. The gesture is not just technological but symbolic, and it signals that the future belongs to those who can command energy, land, water, labor, and attention on a planetary scale (same as it ever was).

What is striking is not simply the amount of electricity involved, though that should give us pause. A gigawatt is not an abstraction. It is rivers dammed, grids expanded, landscapes reorganized, communities displaced or reoriented. It is heat that must be carried away, water that must circulate, minerals that must be extracted. AI training does not float in the cloud. It sits somewhere. It draws from somewhere. It leaves traces.

The deeper issue, though, is how casually this scale is presented as self-justifying.

We are being trained, culturally, to equate intelligence with throughput. To assume that cognition improves in direct proportion to energy consumption. To believe that understanding emerges automatically from scale. This is an old story. Industrial modernity told it with coal and steel. The mid-twentieth century told it with nuclear reactors. Now we tell it with data centers.

But intelligence has never been merely a matter of power input.

From a phenomenological perspective, intelligence is relational before it is computational. It arises from situated attention, from responsiveness to a world that pushes back, from limits as much as from capacities. Scale can amplify, but it can also flatten. When systems grow beyond the horizon of lived accountability, they begin to shape the world without being shaped by it in return.

That asymmetry matters.

There is also a theological question here, though it is rarely named as such. Gigawatt-scale AI is not simply a tool. It becomes an ordering force, reorganizing priorities and imaginaries. It subtly redefines what counts as worth knowing and who gets to decide. In that sense, these systems function liturgically. They train us in what to notice, what to ignore, and what to sacrifice for the sake of speed and dominance.

None of this requires demonizing technology or indulging in nostalgia. The question is not whether AI will exist or even whether it will be powerful. The question is what kind of power we are habituating ourselves to accept as normal.

An ecology of attention cannot be built on unlimited extraction. A future worth inhabiting cannot be sustained by systems that require cities’ worth of electricity simply to refine probabilistic text generation. At some point, the metric of success has to shift from scale to care, from domination to discernment, from raw output to relational fit.

Gigawatts tell us what we can do.
They do not tell us what we should become.

That remains a human question. And increasingly, an ecological one.

Here’s the full paper in PDF, or you can also read it on Academia.edu:

Gigawatts and Wisdom Download

Creaturely Perception and the Greening of Being: Hildegard of Bingen, Edith Stein, and the Ecology of the Cross

Here’s another paper on the Ecology of the Cross that brings together Edith Stein with another one of my favorite thinkers, Hildegard of Bingen (along with John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, and writings from the Desert Mothers and Fathers), on the notion of perception that I’ve been writing about here in recent weeks.

I don’t like to rank my own work, but I do feel that this is one of my strongest pieces regarding this idea of empathy, listening, attention, and ultimately ontology.

Abstract:

This paper argues that the contemporary ecological crisis reflects not only ethical failure but a deeper disturbance in creaturely perception. Ecological devastation persists, I contend, because the world is no longer encountered as intrinsically meaningful, participatory, or given. Drawing on the theological cosmology of Hildegard of Bingen and the phenomenological metaphysics of Edith Stein, the paper develops an account of ecological intentionality as a mode of perception appropriate to finite, dependent creatures. Hildegard’s theology of viriditas articulates a participatory ontology in which creation exists through continuous reception of divine vitality, while Stein’s analysis of finite and eternal being clarifies the epistemological conditions of receptive knowing grounded in creaturely limitation rather than mastery.

Bringing these figures into dialogue with ascetic and mystical traditions, particularly the Desert Fathers and Mothers and the Carmelite theology of John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila, the paper argues that ecological perception requires cruciform formation. Exposure, deprivation, and unknowing function as schools of attention that retrain desire and resist technocratic habits of control. The paper concludes by proposing an Ecology of the Cross, in which vulnerability, dependence, and receptivity become the conditions for ecological faithfulness and renewed participation in a living creation.

Creaturely Perception and the Greening of Being public Download

Learning to Be Addressed by Trees: Vegetal Empathy, Ecological Intentionality, and the Limits of the Human

Here’s a recent paper that I greatly enjoyed writing on Aristotle, Marder, and Edith Stein’s notions, and their relevance to my own creation of ecological intentionality (shaped greatly by Stein’s work on empathy). You can read the full PDF here below…

Abstract

This paper develops a phenomenological account of ethical relation to vegetal life that resists anthropocentric projection and affective assimilation. While recent work within the “vegetal turn” has challenged the philosophical marginalization of plants, many contemporary approaches continue to rely on empathy as the primary ethical bridge between humans and vegetal beings. Drawing on Aristotle’s account of the vegetative soul, Matthew Hall’s advocacy of vegetal empathy, Michael Marder’s philosophy of non-subjective vegetal expression, and Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy, this paper argues that empathy reaches a constitutive limit when applied to plants. Vegetal life does not present itself phenomenologically as experiencing subjectivity and therefore cannot be accessed through empathic intentionality without distortion. In response, the paper proposes ecological intentionality as a distinct mode of attentiveness appropriate to vegetal beings. Ecological intentionality does not seek imaginative access to interiority or reciprocal recognition. Instead, it names a disciplined posture of being addressed, in which human attention is interrupted and ethically reshaped by encounter with non-subjective life. Through sustained phenomenological engagement with trees, the paper argues that vegetal presence discloses ethical demand through persistence, exposure, and temporal depth rather than affective resonance.

Learning to Be Addressed by Trees public Download

Before We Decide What Matters: Minneapolis, ICE, and the Work of Attention

If you’re like me, you are tired of being told what matters. Every day arrives already crowded with urgency from cable news to social media to our email inboxes. There is always something demanding a response, a position, a statement, a judgment. The crises are real and here at home, as we’re seeing in Minneapolis, but also here in Spartanburg. Ecological collapse, technological acceleration, political fracture, spiritual exhaustion. And yet the constant pressure to decide, to weigh in with friends or on social media, to declare allegiance or outrage over Trump’s latest missive, even which news outlets to consume… often leaves us less capable of genuine care rather than more. Moral life begins to feel like triage, and eventually like performance.

I have been wondering whether this exhaustion has less to do with a lack of ethics and more to do with how quickly we rush toward them.

Before we decide what matters, something quieter has already taken place. The world has appeared to us in a certain way. Something has shown up as worthy of concern, or not. Something has addressed us, or passed unnoticed. That prior moment, the way the world first comes into view, is rarely examined. Social media algorithms are designed to outrage us before we have even a moment to process an event. And yet this initial moment of appearance may be the most decisive moral act we ever perform.

Attention is not neutral. It is formative.

We often speak about ethics as if it begins with principles, values, or rules. But those only function once something has already been perceived as meaningful. I cannot care about what I do not notice. I cannot respond to what never appears. Long before moral reasoning begins, there is a posture of perception, a way of being present to what is other than myself.

This is where empathy has become important to me again, not as a sentiment or virtue, but as a mode of knowing. Empathy, understood phenomenologically, is not agreement or emotional fusion. It is not a projection of myself into another, nor a collapse of difference. For Edith Stein, empathy names the experience in which another’s interiority becomes present to me as other, irreducible, and real. It is a way of perceiving foreign consciousness without possessing it.

Crucially, empathy in this sense is not something that follows understanding. It is what makes understanding possible in the first place.

Seen this way, empathy is not primarily ethical. It is ontological. It concerns how beings appear to one another, how the world is allowed to disclose itself, how alterity is either received or flattened. Stein is careful here. Empathy does not erase distance. It preserves it. The other is never absorbed into my own experience, but neither is the other sealed off from me. Relation becomes possible without domination.

For example, this matters deeply for how we think about ecology. Much contemporary environmental discourse quickly shifts toward solutions, metrics, and outcomes, from AI data center debates at city council meetings to creation care initiatives once a group decides to engage locally. These are necessary, but they often skip the slower work of learning how to see. Ecology becomes a problem to manage rather than a field of relationships in which we already participate. The natural world is framed as a resource, a threat, or a victim, rarely as a presence capable of addressing us.

Stein herself did not write ecological theory, but her account of empathy offers a discipline of attention that easily extends beyond the human. If empathy is the experience of encountering another as a center of meaning, not of my own making, then it trains us to resist reducing the world to what it can be used for or controlled. It teaches restraint before response. Attention changes this.

To attend to a tree across seasons, to notice how it sheds, scars, and persists, is not to solve anything. It is to be apprenticed into a different tempo of significance. Ecological time resists panic not by denying urgency, but by deepening responsibility. It trains us to remain with what unfolds slowly, unevenly, and often without spectacle.

This kind of attention does not produce immediate answers. It produces orientation.

I have come to think that much of our moral confusion stems from a failure of perception rather than a failure of values. We argue about what ought to be done while remaining inattentive to what is actually present. We leap toward ethical frameworks while bypassing the more difficult task Stein insists upon by allowing the other to show itself as it is, before we decide what it means or what is owed.

Attention is costly (and incredibly valuable, as social media algorithms have taught us over the last decade, as I noted in my 2015 post). It requires patience, vulnerability, and restraint. It asks us to linger rather than react, to receive rather than master. In a culture shaped by speed and extraction with news cycles lasting just a couple of days, this can feel almost irresponsible. And yet without it, our ethics float free of the world they claim to serve.

To attend is already to take responsibility.

Not because attention guarantees correct action, but because it establishes the conditions under which action can be something other than projection or control. When we learn to notice, to listen, to allow meaning to emerge rather than be imposed, we begin to recover a moral life that is responsive rather than reactive.

Perhaps the most urgent task before us is not deciding what matters next, but recovering the capacity to perceive what has been asking something of us all along.

Footnote: Edith Stein describes empathy not as inference, emotional contagion, or imaginative projection, but as a direct experiential act in which another’s consciousness is given as other while remaining irreducibly distinct from one’s own. Empathy, for Stein, is thus neither ethical evaluation nor moral sentiment, but a foundational mode of perception through which meaning first becomes accessible. See Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989), 10–12, 19–21.

On Schelling’s Naturalism

I’m taking a course on Hegel this semester at CIIS with Prof. Matt Segall (who writes an excellent Substack newsletter) as I wrap up my PhD coursework, so I thought what better time to finally do a deep dive into Schelling, as I have a deficiency in his work and need to understand it more precisely (or at least attempt to).

Hegel and Schelling were once roommates (early 19th Century) before they became rivals. Of course, Hegel became the more prominent philosopher, but Schelling would go on to impact and influence thinkers who have, in-turn, heavily influenced me, from Kierkegaard to Sartre to Merleau-Ponty and many contemporaries interested in the realm of consciousness, philosophies of nature, and exploring religious ontologies from a different point of view than what ended up becoming dominant in the 20th century.

I’m sure I’ll be posting more here about Schelling’s texts in the future!

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_v2 Download

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 Public Download

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.

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.

Quantum–Plasma Consciousness and the Ecology of the Cross

I’ve been thinking a good deal about plasma, physics, artificial intelligence, consciousness, and my ongoing work on The Ecology of the Cross, as all of those areas of my own interest are connected. After teaching AP Physics, Physics, Physical Science, Life Science, Earth and Space Science, and AP Environmental Science for the last 20 years or so, this feels like one of those frameworks that I’ve been building to for the last few decades.

So, here’s a longer paper exploring some of that, with a bibliography of recent scientific research and philosophical and theological insights that I’m pretty proud of (thanks, Zotero and Obsidian!).

Abstract

This paper develops a relational cosmology, quantum–plasma consciousness, that integrates recent insights from plasma astrophysics, quantum foundations, quantum biology, consciousness studies, and ecological theology. Across these disciplines, a shared picture is emerging: the universe is not composed of isolated substances but of dynamic, interdependent processes. Plasma research reveals that galaxy clusters and cosmic filaments are shaped by magnetized turbulence, feedback, and self-organization. Relational interpretations of quantum mechanics show that physical properties arise only through specific interactions, while quantum biology demonstrates how coherence and entanglement can be sustained in living systems. Together, these fields suggest that relationality and interiority are fundamental features of reality. The paper brings this scientific picture into dialogue with ecological theology through what I call The Ecology of the Cross. This cruciform cosmology interprets openness, rupture, and transformation, from quantum interactions to plasma reconnection and ecological succession, as intrinsic to creation’s unfolding. The Cross becomes a symbol of divine participation in the world’s vulnerable and continually renewing relational processes. By reframing consciousness as an intensified, self-reflexive mode of relational integration, and by situating ecological crisis and AI energy consumption within this relational ontology, the paper argues for an ethic of repairing relations and cultivating spiritual attunement to the interiorities of the Earth community.

PDF download below…

Quantum–Plasma Consciousness and the Ecology of the Cross Download

Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being

When I first entered into Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being, I realized almost immediately that I was not reading a standard metaphysical treatise. I was stepping into a conversation about how being itself becomes available to us, how the meaning of existence slowly discloses itself through experience, relation, and attunement. Stein calls the book “an ascent to the meaning of being” in her preface and describes it as written “by a beginner for beginners” (Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, Preface). Yet the scope is anything but beginner level. She begins from the finitude that shapes every human life, our embodied and time-bound existence, and traces the ways it naturally presses toward an origin and fullness of being that is not our own. What strikes me is how this ascent mirrors what I am trying to articulate in The Ecology of the Cross. I am trying to understand how cruciform life opens us to deeper belonging in the more-than-human world, and Stein provides a metaphysical grammar for that movement.

Plasma, Consciousness, and the Phenomenological Cosmos: Relational Fields

Most of the visible universe is not solid, liquid, or gas. Instead, it is plasma, an electrified, dynamic, relational medium that shapes stars, nebulae, auroras, and the vast glowing threads between galaxies. Plasma is not a passive substance but a field that responds, organizes, circulates, and transforms, as far as we understand it, according to the classical model of physics (having been a Physics and AP Physics teacher for years). When physicists describe plasma, they speak of currents, waves, resonances, and instabilities with terms that sound far closer to phenomenology’s language of relations than to the inert mechanics of early modern science.

Edith Stein and Laudato Si’: Recovering the Interior Life of Creation

Here’s a “study guide” and reflection to go along with these thoughts if you’re interested!

Most readers of Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ approach it as an ecological document. It is that, of course. It gives us the vocabulary of “integral ecology,” names the Cry of the Earth Cry of the Poor (Leo Boff), and pushes Christians to confront the ecological devastation happening right in our backyards. But reading it alongside one of my favorite thinkers, Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), has helped me see the encyclical in a deeper light. It is not only a call for ecological reform. It is a call for a renewed way of perceiving the world.

Plasma Consciousness: Thinking With the Luminous Universe

Some nights here in Spartanburg, when the humidity settles like a gentle hand on the earth and the sky finally exhales after a hot Carolina day, I go outside to stand beneath the walnut tree. There’s a particular quiet that isn’t silence at all. It hums. It holds. It feels charged, like something is speaking in a language older than breath.

That stillness always reminds me: we don’t live in a dead universe.

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.

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.

Recovering Entranced and Enchanted Christianity

I had the chance to read Vernon’s work here over the summer and found myself relating a good deal to some of his insights and arguments, particularly as they relate to my studies of Religion and Ecology (but also evaluating the frameworks of philosophers such as Owen Barfield, who plays a pivotal role in the development of what Vernon is putting forth here).

If you’re interested in wider reads that offer historical, theological, and philosophical insights wrapped in consciousness studies and metaphysics, I highly recommend…

A Secret History of Christianity – Mark Vernon:

This book is a response to the crisis, though it differs from others. It focuses on the inward aspect of Christianity’s troubles. It approaches the problem at a felt or mystical level.

The root issue, I believe, lies with how Christianity has come to be presented or, to be more precise, how religious Christians have come to misunderstand the message. What was once experienced as a pathway to more life has, today, morphed into a way of life that to outsiders seems self-evidently deluded, defensive or distorted.

Black Walnut Tree Reading

From my tracking page… Emmylou has picked up on my habit (a consecrated habit, to use the Merleau-Ponty phrasing), and I walked out into the backyard on Sunday to find her reading aloud with the Black Walnut, as I often do during the week.

The tree has begun dropping its heavy fruit, and the air smells faintly sharp as the husks split open on the ground. I noticed how she read with complete absorption, as if she and the tree were both listening together as two kinds of stillness sharing the same breath. It felt like a reminder that reading and resting under a tree are both forms of attention, both ways of being in relationship with a world that holds and teaches us quietly.

As a dad, I was moved to a quick tear.

Yale Div’s Living Village

We were fortunate enough to be able to travel up to New Haven to see the construction of the Living Village this summer at my alma mater, Yale Div this past June… so excited to see this become a reality and hope it’s a sign of more things to come for institutions living intentionally on our amazing planet!

Yale Divinity School opens affordable, sustainable student housing | Connecticut Public:

For the school’s dean, Gregory Sterling, the development was more than a decade in the making, but was important to his idea of ecotheology; a form of theology which focuses on the interrelationships of religion and the environment.

“We have to be stewards, and to realize that in the same way that I’m accountable morally for the way that I treat other human beings, I’m also accountable morally for the way that I treat animals or the world in which I live,” Sterling said.