Ecotheology Archives - Sam Harrelson

A Life in Act: Edith Stein and the Education of Attention

A photograph of Edith Stein, taken around 1920, has become very meaningful to me. She’s not a Catholic, a Carmelite, or the woman the Church will canonize as Teresia Benedicta a Cruce. She’s a philosopher in her late twenties who has already written the most careful phenomenological study of empathy, who has already been told, in ways both polite and structural, that the university has no chair for her. Her gaze in the photograph is level and unhurried. It’s the gaze of someone who has learned to look at things until they give themselves up, which is, in the end, what phenomenology asked of its practitioners and what very few of them managed. I’ve spent the better part of the last few years learning to look at a black walnut tree in my backyard with something like that patience, and I have come to believe that the discipline Stein practiced in Göttingen seminar rooms and the discipline I attempt under Piedmont shade are the same discipline, differently housed. This essay is an attempt to say why her life and her work have come to sit so near the center of my own, and to trace the company she kept along the way, because Stein is unintelligible apart from her conversations… with Husserl, with Reinach, with Scheler, with Conrad-Martius, with Aquinas across seven centuries, with Teresa of Ávila across four, and finally with John of the Cross in a Dutch monastery as the trains began to move.

Breslau

Edith Stein was born on October 12, 1891, in Breslau, then a German city in Prussian Silesia, now the Polish city of Wrocław. The date was important to her mother and came to matter to Edith, as it was Yom Kippur that year, the Day of Atonement, and Auguste Stein always regarded her youngest child’s birth on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar as a kind of sign.[1] She was the youngest of eleven children, seven of whom survived. Her father, Siegfried, died of heatstroke on a business trip before Edith was two, and Auguste took over the family lumber business and ran it with the shrewdness and iron piety that Edith would later describe, with unmistakable love, in the memoir she wrote to preserve the texture of German Jewish life against the caricatures then hardening around it.[2] That memoir, Aus dem Leben einer jüdischen Familie, is worth including here because it establishes something about Stein that her philosophical reputation can obscure: she was a writer of place and household, of lumber yards and holiday tables and the particular smell of her mother’s ledgers. When she set out, in 1933, to answer Nazi propaganda, she did not write a treatise. She wrote down what her family’s life had actually been like, trusting description over argument. Anyone who has tried to write about a home place under threat recognizes the move. Perception first; the ethics arrives through the seeing.

That piety, however, did not last. Around the age of fourteen or fifteen, by her own account, she deliberately stopped praying.[3] She would describe her adolescent and university self as an atheist, though a restless one, a young woman who had traded the God of her mother for what she called the search for truth, without yet suspecting that the two searches might converge. She began her studies at the University of Breslau in psychology under William Stern, and found the discipline, then in its experimental adolescence, unable to say what a psyche even was. Somewhere in those years she read Edmund Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen, and the effect was the one Husserl’s early readers so often report: here was a philosophy that did not begin from theories about consciousness but from consciousness itself, patiently described, its structures allowed to show themselves. In 1913 she moved to Göttingen to study with Husserl directly. She was twenty-one.

Göttingen

The Göttingen that received her was one of the strangest and most fertile philosophical communities of the century. Husserl held court, working his way toward the transcendental turn of Ideen that would eventually estrange him from many of his best students. Adolf Reinach, Husserl’s brilliant assistant, taught the newcomers what phenomenology actually meant in practice; Stein always said it was Reinach, more than Husserl, who taught her to work.[4] Max Scheler moved through the area periodically, lecturing on sympathy, value, and, increasingly, on Catholic religious experience with the enthusiasm of a man in the middle of one of his several conversions. Stein later credited Scheler with removing her rationalist blinders: he did not persuade her of anything, but he made the world of faith visible to her as a world, a region of experience that a phenomenologist had no right to dismiss unexamined.[5] Hedwig Conrad-Martius, a few years ahead of Stein and already doing the realist ontology of nature that would occupy her whole career, became a close friend, and her farmhouse in Bad Bergzabern would later become the site of the decisive night of Stein’s life. The Göttingen circle believed, against the master’s developing idealism, that phenomenology’s slogan, zu den Sachen selbst, to the things themselves, meant the things were really there. Stein evidently belonged to that realist wing from the beginning, and the conviction that essences are discovered rather than constituted never left her. It is the thread that leads, twenty years later, to Aquinas.

Husserl assigned her a dissertation topic that he had left as a gap in his own work: empathy, Einfühlung, the act by which one consciousness apprehends the experience of another. World War I interrupted her dissertation work, and Stein left her studies in 1915 to serve as a Red Cross nursing aide in a lazaretto for infectious disease at Mährisch-Weißkirchen, tending Austrian soldiers with typhus and cholera, an experience of bodies in extremity that marks the dissertation on every page.[6] She completed the doctorate under Husserl at Freiburg in 1916, summa cum laude, and Zum Problem der Einfühlung was published the following year.[7]

The publication is the hinge of everything I take from her. Stein argues that empathy is a sui generis form of intentionality. It is neither inference by analogy, as if I reasoned my way from your grimace to your pain, nor a merging of selves, as the popular use of the word suggests. It is a direct, though non-primordial, givenness of foreign experience: I perceive your joy in your face the way I perceive the tree in its bark and leaf-flutter, immediately, though your joy is given to me as yours and never becomes mine. The other is disclosed as a living body, a Leib rather than a mere Körper, a center of orientation and sensation that I apprehend from outside while acknowledging an inside I can never occupy. And Stein presses the analysis beyond the human: the perception of livingness, of sensate and striving interiority, extends in her account toward the animal, and the question of how far down the ladder of life such apprehension reaches is left standing in the text like an open door.[8] I walked through that door years ago and have not come back. What I have termed ecological intentionality in my dissertation work is, at its root, an attempt to ask Stein’s question at the scale of a watershed on an ecological basis: what would it mean to say that Lawson’s Fork, or the black walnut, or the shoal that remembers its shad runs, is given to consciousness as living, as an interiority I apprehend without occupying? Stein supplies the rigor that keeps such a question from dissolving into sentimentality. Empathy, on her account, is a form of perception with its own evidence, its own fulfillments and disappointments, its own discipline. It can be practiced. It can be trained. It is, in the strict sense, an education of attention, and everything I write under the sign of the Ecology of the Cross begins from her demonstration that such an education is philosophically respectable.

The Assistant

From 1916 to 1918 Stein served as Husserl’s private assistant at Freiburg, a role that consisted largely of imposing order on the master’s mountain of shorthand manuscripts. She organized and substantially edited the materials that became Ideen II, Husserl’s great unfinished study of the constitution of nature, animal life, and spirit, and scholars have increasingly recognized how much of that volume’s architecture bears her hand.[9] It is one of the quiet ironies of the tradition that the phenomenology of the living body which Merleau-Ponty would inherit and transfigure came to him partly through pages Stein arranged. When I set Stein and Merleau-Ponty side by side in my own chapters, I am in some measure reuniting a text with its editor.

She attempted to habilitate, the German qualification for a professorship, and was refused. Göttingen would not consider a woman; Freiburg deferred, and her 1919 petition to the Prussian ministry helped prompt a 1920 circular declaring that sex should be no bar to habilitation. This ruling came too late to help her and stands as one of those bureaucratic monuments built on a particular person’s closed door.[10] She wrote Potenz und Akt in 1931 as a final habilitation attempt, and it too went nowhere institutionally with publishers or her correspondence network. The academy’s loss is difficult to overstate. I read it as the historical condition of her freedom. Denied the academic chair, she was spared the chair’s constraints, and the work that followed, the Aquinas translations, the Münster lectures, the Carmelite metaphysics, has an amplitude that the Ordinarius system of her day rarely produced.

The Spiritual Turn

Stein’s conversion has been told so often that it risks falling into legend, and the legend flattens what the record shows: a convergence of encounters over roughly four years, each one phenomenologically dense. The first was Anna Reinach. Adolf Reinach died in Flanders in November 1917, and Stein went to Göttingen expecting to console a broken widow and to help sort his papers. She found instead a woman held upright by the Cross, grieving fully and yet somehow already handing her grief over, and Stein said late in her life that this was the moment her unbelief collapsed… her first meeting, as she put it, with the Cross and its divine power, borne by someone who carried it.[11] Notice what kind of evidence this is. Rather than an argument, it’s a perception of another’s interiority, an act of Einfühlung, and what Stein perceived in Anna Reinach was a real power operating in a real soul. Her own dissertation had prepared her to trust this sort of givenness. The philosopher of empathy was converted through an empathic perception; the system, so to speak, executed on its author.

The second encounter came in the summer of 1921 at the Conrad-Martius farmhouse in Bad Bergzabern. Left alone one evening, Stein took a book at random from the shelf, the autobiography of Teresa of Ávila, and read it through the night. She closed it at dawn and said to herself, das ist die Wahrheit, that is the truth.[12] Teresa’s Life moves beyond the genre of apologetics. Instead, it’s a first-person description of an interior itinerary, the most sustained piece of phenomenology of prayer the sixteenth century produced, and Stein read it as a phenomenologist reads a protocol: here is a report of experience, coherent, differentiated, bearing its own evidence. She was baptized on January 1, 1922, at St. Martin’s in Bad Bergzabern, with Hedwig Conrad-Martius, a Protestant, standing as her godmother, an ecumenical detail I hold onto for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who knows my own churchly arrangements.[13] Her mother wept when told. Edith knelt beside her in the synagogue afterward and prayed the psalms; she never regarded her baptism as a departure from the people of Israel, and everything that followed, to the very end, confirms that she was genuine in that belief.

She wished to enter Carmel immediately. Her spiritual advisors, sensibly, said no. Her mother’s grief was fresh, and her gifts were needed in the world. So from 1923 to 1931 she taught German language and literature at St. Magdalena’s, the Dominican sisters’ teacher-training school in Speyer, living semi-monastically, teaching adolescent girls by day and working through the nights on the project her Jesuit director Erich Przywara set before her: a German translation of Thomas Aquinas’s Quaestiones disputatae de veritate.[14] Przywara, whose Analogia Entis was taking shape in those same years, understood that the phenomenological school and the Thomist revival needed each other, and he engineered the meeting inside one mind. Stein’s Aquinas is a working philosopher’s Aquinas, rendered into the vocabulary of the phenomenologists so that the two traditions could actually converse, and her 1929 contribution to Husserl’s seventieth-birthday Festschrift, a staged dialogue comparing Husserl’s phenomenology with the philosophy of St. Thomas, remains one of the great short documents of twentieth-century thought. The student, with perfect filial respect, informing the master that intentionality does not itself settle the question of being.[15]

Here’s where Stein’s biography enters my comprehensive exams. Husserl held that essence, Wesen, could be described in bracketed independence from existence; the epoché suspends the question of being precisely so the structures of givenness can appear. Stein came to hold, with Thomas, that the analysis cannot rest there, because essence in a finite being does not carry its own act of existing. What a thing is and that it is are really distinct in creatures, and the distinction opens finite being toward the One in whom essence and existence coincide. In the terms Aristotle bequeathed to both of them, δύναμις (dynamis, potency) is intelligible only from ἐνέργεια (energeia, actuality), and the ἐντελέχεια (entelecheia) of a living form, its being-at-work-staying-itself, is prior to every capacity it grounds.[16] Stein worked this out first in Potenz und Akt (Potency and Act) and then, in the Cologne Carmel, expanded it into her masterwork, Endliches und ewiges Sein, Finite and Eternal Being. This was an attempt, as she framed it, at an ascent to the meaning of being with phenomenology and Thomas as the two guides.[17] My present argument about ecological normativity, that the self-maintaining organism can bear normative weight only as form-in-act and not as bare autopoietic process, is Stein’s argument against Husserl transposed into the philosophy of the organism. Potency cannot norm itself. The criterion arrives with act. I found the lever in her, and I keep finding that when I press on Bergson or Ruyer or the autopoiesis literature, the argument in the material is wherever Stein has already been standing.

Münster, the Letter, and Carmel

In 1932 Stein was appointed lecturer at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Münster, where she lectured on the structure of the human person and on the education and vocations of women, essays that anticipate, with a calm that now reads as courage, arguments about the full intellectual dignity of women that the Church would take another half century to begin catching up with.[18] The appointment lasted a year. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, April 1933, ended the teaching career of every German academic of Jewish descent, and Stein, seeing with terrible clarity what was coming, wrote directly to Pope Pius XI, asking the Church to speak publicly against the persecution of the Jews, warning that silence would be purchased at the price of complicity. The letter received a routine acknowledgment. It was sealed in the Vatican archives until 2003.[19] I don’t know a sharper parable of institutional religion in the modern era, and I say that as an ordained minister who loves the institution enough to keep writing it letters.

The closed doors had, by then, become a sort of corridor. In October 1933 she entered the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Cologne, and at her clothing in April 1934 took the name she had, in a sense, been carrying since Anna Reinach’s parlor: Teresia Benedicta a Cruce, Teresa Blessed by the Cross.[20] Her superiors, to their lasting credit, ordered her to keep writing. In the cell in Cologne she finished Endliches und ewiges Sein, whose publication was blocked because its author was, in the new legal fiction, non-Aryan. After the November pogrom of 1938 her presence endangered the Cologne community, and on New Year’s Eve she was driven across the border to the Carmel in Echt, in the Dutch Limburg. Her sister Rosa, herself by then a Catholic, joined her there as a portress. In Echt, at her superiors’ request, she began a study of John of the Cross for the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth: Kreuzeswissenschaft, The Science of the Cross, a phenomenology of the dark night in which the mystic’s itinerary of dispossession is read as the form of the soul’s conformation to Christ crucified.[21] The manuscript’s final pages were on her desk, unfinished, on the second of August, 1942.

The Dutch Catholic bishops had, the previous Sunday, read from every pulpit a pastoral letter publicly condemning the deportations of the Jews. The occupation’s reprisal was precise: the arrest of all Catholic Jews in the Netherlands, the converts, the ones the Church had claimed as her own. Stein and Rosa were taken from the Echt Carmel that afternoon. Witnesses in the transit camps at Amersfoort and Westerbork describe her moving among the distraught mothers, washing children, combing hair, a Leib among Leiber, doing what she had done in the typhus wards of 1915.[22] Her reported words to Rosa at the moment of arrest were, come, we are going for our people.[23] The transport reached Auschwitz-Birkenau on August 9, 1942, and she was killed in the gas chambers that day, with Rosa, among the people of her birth, under the sign of the name she had chosen. The Church beatified her in Cologne in 1987, canonized her on October 11, 1998, under Pope John Paul II, and named her, a year later, co-patroness of Europe, a Jewish philosopher standing in the calendar beside Benedict and Bridget and Catherine, which is either an astonishing act of ecclesial repentance or the beginning of one.[24]

Why She Holds Me

Stein instructs me at four depths, and the deepest is the one hardest to write about.

First, she gives me the philosophical warrant for the kind of attention my work depends on. Einfühlung, in her strict sense, is the perceptual act in which foreign interiority is given without being possessed, and her analysis is the strongest available foundation for what I have been calling ecological intentionality: the claim that creatures, watersheds, and living places can be apprehended as centers of striving and sensation, that such apprehension is perception rather than projection, and that it carries evidence and admits of discipline. When I stand under the black walnut in early May and register its leafing-out as an act it is performing rather than an event merely occurring, I am doing something Stein described in 1916, and her rigor is what lets me distinguish that perception from wishfulness. The tree is given as living. The givenness can be interrogated. That is her gift, and it is why perception precedes ethics in everything I write. She showed that the seeing itself, done honestly, already carries the claim.

Second, she models the route from phenomenology to ontology that my dissertation attempts to walk. Description was never enough for her, because the described essence kept raising the question of its own act of being, and she followed the question all the way to the real distinction and to the God in whom essence and existence are one. The organism that grounds ecological normativity in my work does so only as form-in-act, ἐντελέχεια, and I learned to make that argument from her long negotiation between Husserl and Thomas. She teaches that fidelity to the phenomena eventually requires metaphysics, and that the metaphysics must be earned, page by patient page, never imported.

Third, there is the Cross. My theological work gathers under the phrase the Ecology of the Cross, and I owe the grammar of that phrase to her Kreuzeswissenschaft, The Science of the Cross. Stein read John of the Cross’s dark night as a science (not in our current objective-minded understanding of what that term implies), a structured knowledge of dispossession, the soul unmade in its attachments so that it may be conformed to the crucified and rising Christ. Paul writes in Philippians that Christ ἐκένωσεν ἑαυτόν, emptied himself (the verb is κενόω; the noun tradition drew from it is κένωσις or kenosis), and Stein’s insight, the one I have carried into ecological territory, is that this self-emptying is a pattern legible in the structure of creaturely existence itself.[25] The fallow field, the leaf abscission of October, the flood that unmakes a channel so the channel can live, the whole creation that Paul says συστενάζει, groans together (Romans 8:22, from συστενάζω), in the futility, ματαιότης, to which it was subjected in hope: these are, I have come to believe, the science of the cross written in the book of “nature,” and Stein is the one who taught me that such a science could be rigorous.[26] She also, in the manner of her death, finished the teaching. The last thing she wrote was a phenomenology of dispossession, and the last thing she did was undergo one, freely construing it as an offering for her people. The work and the life close like two halves of a hinge on a door that swings open.

Fourth, and least articulable: she shows me that a life does not have to choose between the seminar room and the sanctuary, between the archive and the prayer bench, between the people of one’s birth and the faith of one’s conviction. Every institution she approached partially refused her… the university for her gender, the Reich for her blood, and even the Church, in her lifetime, gave her petition a form letter. She responded to each refusal by going deeper rather than elsewhere, and the depth turned out to be where the work was. I teach Sunday school in a Presbyterian church as a Baptist minister while writing a dissertation at an institute in California on phenomenology, trees, and mycorrhizal networks, and there are days when the arrangement feels less like a vocation than a filing error. Stein is the figure I consult on those days. Her life argues that the integrations the institutions cannot imagine are exactly the ones a person can live, provided the person is willing to let attention, rather than ambition, set the itinerary. She looked at things until they gave themselves up. Then she let herself be given. The order of those two sentences is, I think, the whole lesson from her work and life and faith, and I am still early in learning it, out under the walnut, where the light comes down through the leaves the way it must have come down through the grille at Echt, ordinary and unrepeatable, asking only to be seen.

Notes

[1] Edith Stein, Life in a Jewish Family: Her Unfinished Autobiographical Account, trans. Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D., The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1986), 71–72. Stein records her mother’s attachment to the Yom Kippur birth in the memoir’s opening chapters.

[2] Stein began Aus dem Leben einer jüdischen Familie in 1933, framing it explicitly as testimony against National Socialist caricature; see her foreword, Life in a Jewish Family, 23–25.

[3] Stein, Life in a Jewish Family, 148. Her formulation is that she “deliberately and consciously” gave up praying.

[4] On Reinach’s pedagogical role in the Göttingen circle, see Alasdair MacIntyre, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913–1922 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 58–74.

[5] Stein, Life in a Jewish Family, 260–261, where she credits Scheler with dismantling the “rationalistic prejudices” of her upbringing and opening “the world of faith” to her regard.

[6] Stein’s lazaretto service at Mährisch-Weißkirchen is narrated at length in Life in a Jewish Family, chaps. 8–9.

[7] Edith Stein, Zum Problem der Einfühlung (Halle: Buchdruckerei des Waisenhauses, 1917); English: On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein, 3rd rev. ed., Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989).

[8] Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, 58–63, on the constitution of the living body (Leib) and the extension of empathic apprehension to animal life. For the systematic development of sentient and plant life, see also her Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, trans. Mary Catharine Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki, Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 7 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000).

[9] On Stein’s editorial shaping of the Ideen II materials, see Marianne Sawicki, Body, Text, and Science: The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), esp. chaps. 5–6.

[10] The Prussian ministerial circular of February 21, 1920, issued in the wake of Stein’s petition, declared that membership in the female sex constituted no obstacle to habilitation. See MacIntyre, Edith Stein, 14–15.

[11] Stein’s testimony, reported by the Jesuit Johannes Hirschmann from her own account at Echt, names the encounter with Anna Reinach as “my first encounter with the Cross and the divine power it imparts to those who bear it.” See Waltraud Herbstrith, Edith Stein: A Biography, trans. Bernard Bonowitz (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 56–57.

[12] Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 65. The night reading of Teresa’s Vida at Bad Bergzabern occurred in the summer of 1921.

[13] Stein was baptized January 1, 1922, at St. Martin’s Church, Bad Bergzabern, taking the baptismal name Theresia Hedwig, the latter in honor of Conrad-Martius, who stood as godmother despite her Protestantism. Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 68–69.

[14] Thomas von Aquin, Untersuchungen über die Wahrheit (Quaestiones disputatae de veritate), trans. Edith Stein, 2 vols. (Breslau: Borgmeyer, 1931–1932). On Przywara’s direction, see Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 82–86.

[15] Edith Stein, “Husserls Phänomenologie und die Philosophie des heiligen Thomas von Aquino,” in Festschrift Edmund Husserl zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, Ergänzungsband (Halle: Niemeyer, 1929), 315–338; English in Edith Stein, Knowledge and Faith, trans. Walter Redmond, Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 8 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000). The published essay recast an original dialogue form in which Husserl and Thomas converse at night in the master’s study.

[16] Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (Θ), 1049b4–1051a3, on the priority of ἐνέργεια to δύναμις; De Anima II.1, 412a19–b9, on first and second actuality and the soul as ἐντελέχεια of the organic body.

[17] Edith Stein, Potenz und Akt: Studien zu einer Philosophie des Seins, Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 10 (Freiburg: Herder, 2005; composed 1931); Endliches und ewiges Sein: Versuch eines Aufstiegs zum Sinn des Seins, Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 11/12 (Freiburg: Herder, 2006; composed 1935–1936); English: Finite and Eternal Being, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt, Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 9 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002).

[18] The Münster lectures and related addresses are collected in Edith Stein, Essays on Woman, trans. Freda Mary Oben, 2nd rev. ed., Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996).

[19] Stein’s letter to Pius XI, dated April 1933 and transmitted through Abbot Raphael Walzer of Beuron, was made public upon the 2003 opening of the relevant Vatican archives. For the text and circumstances, see the documentation of the Cologne Carmel and Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 104–107.

[20] Stein entered the Cologne Carmel on October 14, 1933, and received the habit and her religious name on April 15, 1934.

[21] Edith Stein, Kreuzeswissenschaft: Studie über Johannes vom Kreuz, Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 18 (Freiburg: Herder, 2003); English: The Science of the Cross, trans. Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D., Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 6 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002).

[22] The Westerbork testimonies, including that of the Dutch official Wielek and fellow prisoners, are gathered in Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 180–186.

[23] “Komm, wir gehen für unser Volk.” The words were reported by witnesses in the Echt community; see Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 177–178. As with most last words, the attestation is testimonial rather than documentary, and I report it as such.

[24] Beatified by John Paul II in Cologne, May 1, 1987; canonized in Rome, October 11, 1998; named co-patroness of Europe, with Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, in the apostolic letter Spes Aedificandi, October 1, 1999.

[25] Philippians 2:7, ἀλλὰ ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν μορφὴν δούλου λαβών (“but he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant”). The verb is κενόω, “to empty”; the theological noun κένωσις derives from it.

[26] Romans 8:20–22: the creation subjected to ματαιότης (“futility,” the Septuagint’s rendering of הֶבֶל in Ecclesiastes) in hope, and πᾶσα ἡ κτίσις συστενάζει καὶ συνωδίνει, “the whole creation groans together and labors together” (συστενάζω, “to groan with”). I have traced this line at greater length in “The Ecology of Ecclesiastes,” Carolina Ecology, 2026.

Bibliography

Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Harrelson, Sam. “The Ecology of Ecclesiastes.” Carolina Ecology, 2026.

Herbstrith, Waltraud. Edith Stein: A Biography. Translated by Bernard Bonowitz. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992.

John Paul II. Spes Aedificandi. Apostolic letter. October 1, 1999.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913–1922. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.

Sawicki, Marianne. Body, Text, and Science: The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997.

Stein, Edith. Endliches und ewiges Sein: Versuch eines Aufstiegs zum Sinn des Seins. Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 11/12. Freiburg: Herder, 2006.

Stein, Edith. Essays on Woman. Translated by Freda Mary Oben. 2nd rev. ed. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 2. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996.

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

Stein, Edith. “Husserls Phänomenologie und die Philosophie des heiligen Thomas von Aquino.” In Festschrift Edmund Husserl zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet, 315–338. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, Ergänzungsband. Halle: Niemeyer, 1929.

Stein, Edith. Knowledge and Faith. Translated by Walter Redmond. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 8. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000.

Stein, Edith. Kreuzeswissenschaft: Studie über Johannes vom Kreuz. Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 18. Freiburg: Herder, 2003.

Stein, Edith. Life in a Jewish Family: Her Unfinished Autobiographical Account. Translated by Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 1. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1986.

Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Translated by Waltraut Stein. 3rd rev. ed. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 3. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989.

Stein, Edith. Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities. Translated by Mary Catharine Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 7. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000.

Stein, Edith. Potenz und Akt: Studien zu einer Philosophie des Seins. Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 10. Freiburg: Herder, 2005.

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

Stein, Edith. Zum Problem der Einfühlung. Halle: Buchdruckerei des Waisenhauses, 1917.

Thomas Aquinas. Untersuchungen über die Wahrheit (Quaestiones disputatae de veritate). Translated by Edith Stein. 2 vols. Breslau: Borgmeyer, 1931–1932.

PDF version available for download here:

Edith Stein – A Life in Act Download

Sacramental Place Poetry Rooted in the Carolinas

As I’ve been working on my PhD Comprehensive Exams this summer, I’ve been frequently asking myself what it is I’m actually trying to write.

That sounds like the sort of question I should have answered a long time ago, especially after years of blogging, teaching, preaching, consulting, podcasting, and now reading for a PhD in ecology, spirituality, and religion. But the truth is that sometimes you only recognize the shape of your work after you’ve been doing it for a while (which I often said to my middle and high school students as they journeyed). You look back over a few poems, a few essays, a few notes written in the early morning before the kids are fully awake, and you begin to notice the threads.

In the midst of this, a phrase came to me while working in the yard to gather oak, maple, and walnut branches after a summer thunderstorm:

Sacramental Place Poetry Rooted in the Carolinas.

I like that term because it gives an expression to something I’ve been working on for years without pinning it down too tightly. I don’t think of my poems as “nature poems” in the abstract. I’m not usually writing about nature as scenery or background, and frankly don’t like the term (or “wilderness”). I’m writing about places that have addressed me in some way.

Obviously, there’s the black walnut tree in our yard here in Spartanburg. Cedar roses gathered from the front yard for an anniversary with Merianna, tobacco fields giving way to pine. Red clay and rain in the Piedmont. The Pee Dee. The Lowcountry. Rivers, ditches, old roads, churchyards, school mornings, family errands, and the small objects children leave behind in the grass.

Those things aren’t decorative, but are part of the grammar of my life.

I grew up in South Carolina, left for a while, and have spent a good portion of my adult life trying to understand what it means to belong to a place without pretending that belonging is simple. The Carolinas are beautiful, but they certainly aren’t innocent. Every landscape here carries memory. Indigenous presence and erasure. Enslaved labor and tobacco money. Church bells with pine plantations. Family stories. Stormwater ditches. Kudzu. Development. Black walnuts and cedars. The land remembers more than we do, and much of my writing has become an attempt to listen (before I offer something of an explanation).

That’s probably why trees show up so often in my poems and essays. Trees have become, for me, a kind of theological tutor. Instead of rushing or arguing in the way we argue, they receive weather, injury, children, birds, insects, drought, and time. They aren’t passive as some Aristotelians might veer towards, though. They’re constantly negotiating relation.

Roots, fungi, water, light, decay, growth, fruit, shade. There’s a whole world of attention happening in a tree, and most of it takes place beneath the level of our human perceptions or notice.

My own daily practice beneath the black walnut in our yard has taught me that attention isn’t a mood any more than creativity, with all of its weirdness and fickle muse, is. Attention is a discipline. Some mornings, nothing dramatic happens. A squirrel fusses while a Northern Cardinal cuts across the yard. A walnut falls. A child’s toy sits where it was abandoned the day before. The grass is wet while my coffee gets cold. But given enough mornings, these small things become more than small things. They become a way of being instructed by the world.

That’s where the sacramental language comes in for me.

By sacramental, I don’t mean that every leaf is a sermon illustration, or that every tree needs to be turned into a symbol as quickly as possible. I mean (almost) the opposite. The sacramental begins when the world is allowed to be itself deeply enough that it discloses more than itself, as Merleau-Ponty has taught me. A walnut remains a walnut while a cedar cone remains a cedar cone, no matter how much I want to apply an abstract level of emotion like love onto it. Red clay remains red clay. But in their full presence, they also carry relation, memory, gift, wound, and grace.

That has shaped the way I think about theology, too. I’m an ordained minister, and I still believe that Christian language has something true and necessary to say about the world. But I’ve become much less interested in theology that hovers above place and more interested in theology that has dirt under its fingernails as I’ve aged. The cross, for instance, has become harder for me to imagine only as an abstract doctrine. It was actually wood before it was a symbol. It was tree before it was theology. The Cross belonged to the same creation that Christian faith too often treats as stage scenery for human salvation.

So when I write about the Cross as a ruined tree, or grace as something greening through what has already been given, I’m not trying to be clever. I’m trying to recover something that should have been obvious all along, in my opinion… faith happens somewhere. Salvation, if we are going to use that word (another one of those words I struggle with, much like nature and wilderness), cannot mean escape from this world that God loves. It must involve learning how to see, inhabit, repair, and love this world more truthfully.

That’s also why family appears so often in what I write. My poems are full of trees, but they are also full of children’s laughter, marriage, errands, school mornings, half-finished meals, books, socks in the grass, and the ordinary clutter of a house where life is actually happening.

I don’t want a spirituality that requires me to leave all of that behind in order to find depth. The depth is there already. The trick is learning how to notice it without sentimentalizing it.

A cedar rose gathered from the yard can become a way of thinking about marriage. A walnut falling in the grass can become an invitation. A child’s forgotten shovel near the fence can become part of the liturgy of a morning. These aren’t grand revelations in the usual sense. To me, they’re more like reminders that nothing here is only here.

The Carolina part matters, too. I don’t want to write as if place were interchangeable. The Piedmont is not the Lowcountry. The Pee Dee is not Appalachia by any means. Spartanburg is not Marion County, though both live in me now (and certainly not Greenville, despite how much some folks in elected offices here seem to want that to be the case). Each place has its own ecology of memory. Each place teaches attention differently. The Carolina landscape has formed my imagination in ways I am still trying to understand: the humidity, the pine straw, the old church Baptist and Presbyterian and Methodist languages and songs, the roads between small towns, the sound of summer insects, the uneasy layering of beauty and violence, tenderness and history.

Maybe that is why poetry feels increasingly necessary to me in my present context. Prose can explain, and I do love prose for that. Essays let me follow an idea, trace a history, build an argument, and hopefully make a convincing case. But poetry lets me stay closer to the moment before explanation closes around it. Poetry gives me a way to let the walnut fall, to let the cedar open, to let ruin become river before I decide too quickly what any of it means.

I don’t know that I set out to become a person who writes poems of place. I had no idea I’d have numerous poems published in anthologies and literary magazines. I certainly didn’t set out to write “sacramental place poetry rooted in the Carolinas,” because that phrase only arrived rather unexpectedly after the work had already begun. But I can see now that much of what I write is an attempt to practice a kind of ecological attention. I’m trying to attend to the more-than-human world, to the household, to memory, to Christian faith, to the old wounds and stubborn grace of this region, and to the ways all of these keep speaking through one another.

That may be why I keep returning to the same images of trees, rain, children, ruin, roots, rivers, crosses, fields, and birds. The “ordinary” holiness of a yard in the morning.

I’m writing because I want to remember that the world is alive with address.

I’m writing because I want to learn how to receive that address without rushing to master it.

I’m writing because the Carolinas have made claims on me, and I suspect I will spend the rest of my life learning how to answer.

These days, that answer often comes as a poem.

And with that, here’s a poem I wrote:

The Walnut Keeps Time in Spartanburg

At the edge of the yard in Spartanburg, where the black walnut leans into its own weather, morning arrives without asking to be believed.

The children have left their small offerings behind: a sun-faded ball in the clover, a plastic shovel near the fence, one damp sock folded by rain into the grass.

The tree receives them all with the old patience of wood, lifting nothing, refusing nothing, making a chapel from shade and green husk.

I sit beneath it with coffee gone cool and a book open in my lap, trying again to learn what the world says before I ask it to mean something.

The walnut does not hurry. It darkens its fruit slowly, lets squirrels argue overhead, lets ants keep their bright roads through the red clay.

Somewhere beyond the yard, traffic gathers itself toward school and work, toward errands, bells, the ordinary liturgies of another Carolina morning.

But here, under this rough crown, time is not a line so much as a widening ring, the hidden labor of root and rain, the way a life grows inward before anyone sees what it has become.

I think of the cross, not polished and lifted high, but once a tree, once sap, once leaf, once a body drinking light from the same sun that warms my hands.

Maybe grace is like that, not arriving from elsewhere, but greening through what has already been given: this yard, this breath, these children growing louder, this marriage of errands and mercy, this Piedmont soil holding more memory than I know how to carry.

A walnut falls. Then another.

The sound is small, almost comic, a wooden knock against the day’s closed door.

Still, I hear it as invitation.

Pay attention, it says. Nothing here is only here. Even the bruised fruit splitting in the grass is busy becoming food, stain, shadow, and prayer.

Comprehensive Exams Begin

Just a short note to say that I’m very excited to share that I’ve finished up my coursework towards my PhD at CIIS and am advancing into my two comprehensive exams. Once those are completed (hopefully by the end of the year), I’ll be in full dissertation mode. Exciting!

Here’s my reading list if you’re interested in what I’ll be reading and working on the next few months…

Harrelson_Comprehensive Exam_Summer_2026_Reading List Final Download

Ecological Intentionality and the Metaphysics of Living Form

Ecological Intentionality and the Metaphysics of Living Form continues my ongoing work at the intersection of phenomenology, ecological theology, and process-oriented metaphysics. Beginning with sustained attention to the black walnut tree in our backyard here in Spartanburg, this paper asks whether non-human organisms can be understood as bearers of interiority rather than as merely complex mechanisms. Drawing on Henri Bergson’s account of duration, Raymond Ruyer’s theory of absolute survey, Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of embodiment and flesh, I work to develop “Ecological Intentionality” as a way of describing the living world as active, self-organizing, and meaningfully present. The paper argues that our ecological crisis is not only a failure of policy or management, but also a failure of perception, and that any deeper ecological repair must begin with learning to see living form more ontologically “true.”

Harrelson_Ecological_Intentionality_Public Download

Einfühlung: Stein, Ruyer, and Bergson

There’s a moment (you’ve had it, I’ve definitely had it) when you stop in the middle of something like a walk and feel, with a certainty that precedes any argument, that something is happening in the organism a few feet away from you. Not that it is moving, or making noise, or occupying space in a way that catches your eye. It’s something more interior than that. A stillness that isn’t empty and a kind of attention in the world that is not yours.

It could be a crow on a fence post, watching you with that particular corvid watchfulness that doesn’t feel like surveillance so much as being assessed. It could be a stand of white oaks at the edge of a parking lot, their roots negotiating some underground arrangement you’ll never see. It could be a box turtle holding perfectly still in the leaf litter while you stand two feet away, the two of you caught together in something that doesn’t quite have a name.

You feel it, and then you feel slightly embarrassed about feeling it, because the dominant story we’ve inherited says that whatever is happening over there is happening in the dark and that the lights of inner experience are a human franchise, or at best a mammalian one, and that the crow and the oaks and the turtle are performing the outward signs of life without anyone home to experience them. The embarrassment is cultural, but the feeling is older.

I’ve been thinking about Edith Stein lately, and about what she might say to this moment.

Stein’s contribution to philosophy, at its most concentrated, is a theory of how we ever know another mind at all. She called it Einfühlung, or empathy, though the German carries something richer than the English… literally, a feeling-into. Her 1917 dissertation (written under Edmund Husserl, in the phenomenological tradition, before WW1 had finished) asked a question that seems obvious until you try to answer it… how do I know that you have an inner life?

It’s not how I infer it, or simulate it, or project it from my own case. How do I know it in the primary, pre-reflective, perceptual sense that I know there is a table in front of me or that the light has gone warm and late? Her answer was that empathy is itself a mode of perception. I don’t reason my way to your interiority, but I perceive it, the way I perceive depth in a visual field. The perception can be mistaken, refined, or enriched. But it is perceptual first.

What interests me so much is that Stein was careful about something most readers slide past because she distinguished between empathy as an act (I reach toward you) and empathy as a structure (there is something there to reach toward). The act depends on the structure. I can only empathize with something that has an interior to meet. And she was explicit that this interiority is not identical to the consciousness humans experience. Rather, empathy is a more basic feature of what it means to be a subject at all, to have an inner life that is genuinely yours, from which you encounter the world.

The question she didn’t fully pursue, and I think this is because the intellectual world she was working in hadn’t yet given her the tools or even vocabulary in terms of ecological intentionality, is what it would mean to extend that structure beyond the human. What if the crow is a subject? Not a metaphor for subjectivity, not a cute approximation of it. Actually, a locus of interior life, capable of being met?

Raymond Ruyer was a French philosopher working in the mid-twentieth century who was, for a long time (until very recently), almost unread outside of France, until Deleuze cited him, and then, later a group of philosophers, including Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux started to take him seriously, and then he was rediscovered again by thinkers working on biology and consciousness. His central claim is strange and precise in a way… every living form exercises what he called absolute survey or a kind of self-enjoying, self-forming awareness that cannot be reduced to spatial extension.

This sounds mystical, but it isn’t. It’s more of a biological claim. The embryo developing into an organism isn’t executing a genetic program the way a computer executes code. It is surveying itself, holding its own form in view, orienting its development toward what it is becoming. The cell is not merely processing information, but it has a kind of first-person orientation toward its own activity. This isn’t a capacity that emerges at some threshold of neurological complexity, but it’s a feature of living form as such. The amoeba surveys. The developing limb surveys. I’d argue the mitochondria do the same. There is no organism (or division or formative part of it) without some minimal version of this self-enjoying interiority.

What this means for Stein’s question is significant. If Ruyer is right, then there is genuinely something there, some interior to be met, in every living organism (and we can extend that to its parts and even down to the atomic or quantum level if thought out). Empathy isn’t being extended beyond its proper domain when we feel it toward a turtle or an oak. It is operating precisely as Stein described and perceiving an interiority that is actually present. The embarrassment was a category error.

Henri Bergson adds the temporal dimension. His notion of durée, or duration as lived time, describes how every living (maybe more-than-living) thing carries its past forward in a genuinely creative, not mechanically determined, way. The organism is not a static configuration that happens to move; it is a memory in motion, accumulating its history in a way that shapes its encounter with each new moment. The bird knows its territory the way your body knows how to ride a bicycle as a kind of lived past that has become part of what it is, rather than an explicit piece of information stored and retrieved.

This matters for empathy because it gives the encounter thickness. When you stop and feel that something is happening in the organism (or rock?) a few feet away, what you are meeting is not just a present configuration. You are meeting a duration, and an unfolding, an other with its own temporal interiority, its own accumulated past pressing forward into the present. The feeling of interiority you perceive is not a projection. It’s the trace of that duration registering on your own perceptual field.

Stein, Ruyer, and Bergson are not saying the same thing, of course. Stein is doing phenomenology and describing the structure of the perceptual act. Ruyer is doing philosophy of biology by describing the structure of living forms. Bergson is doing philosophy of time by describing the structure of living memory. But they triangulate on something that, taken together, amounts to a fairly serious challenge to the dominant story… that empathy across species is possible not because we are projecting human experience onto non-human life, but because interiority is a feature of life itself, graded and various, and the perceptual capacity to meet it is something we actually have.

There is a spiritual dimension to this that I can’t ignore or try to pass over without mentioning.

Stein herself became a Carmelite nun and was eventually martyred at Auschwitz along with her sister. She was killed as a Jew, having been born into a Jewish family and having converted to Catholicism after reading Teresa of Ávila in one long night of encounter with a text. She never treated phenomenology and spirituality as separate projects. For her, the capacity to perceive another’s interiority was not merely a cognitive achievement. It was a form of participation in the ground of being and a way that consciousness opens toward what is genuinely other, which she eventually understood in terms of the soul’s movement toward God.

I am not trying to import that theological framework wholesale. But something in it strikes me as exactly right when I stand in the Carolina Piedmont landscape and feel that quality of attention coming back at me from the world. The embarrassment I described at the beginning… the cultural reflex that says you are projecting, anthropomorphizing, romantically confused… that anxious embarrassment assumes that the proper direction of consciousness is inward, toward the self, and that any apparent opening toward the world is a kind of sentimental error.

Stein’s phenomenology and the biological philosophies of Ruyer and Bergson suggest otherwise. The opening toward the other is not an error. It is the structure of consciousness itself and the capacity to be oriented toward an interiority that is genuinely not yours, to receive it without collapsing the difference between you. And if that capacity extends, as I believe it does, to the more-than-human world… then what we wrongly call “nature” is not a backdrop to the drama of human consciousness but a field of genuine subjects, each carrying its own duration, each available in some degree to the kind of participatory perception Stein was describing.

This is where the spiritual layer or dimension becomes unavoidable, at least for me. Because if the world is structured this way, and if there is really something happening over there, and if we have a perceptual capacity to meet it, then the question of how we inhabit the Piedmont, how we attend to the shoals and the hemlocks and the red-tailed hawk quartering the field at dusk, is not merely an aesthetic or ethical question. It is something closer to a contemplative one. The attention itself is a form of participation. The capacity to stop and feel that something is happening over there, and to let that feeling be more than embarrassment, is a practice… not a conclusion.

Stein did not survive to work out the full implications of what she had begun. Ruyer died in 1987, still relatively obscure here in the United States universities and colleges, and in mainstream thinking. Bergson, at least, was famous in his time, though his reputation later suffered the usual eclipse that attends thinkers who insist on the reality of time and memory against the reductionist program (especially after the Einstein debate). But the three of them together sketch something I keep returning to in my own lived experience… the world is not dark. The lights are on in there. And we have always known how to read them; we just stopped trusting ourselves to do so.

The crow on the fence post is still watching you. The box turtle has not moved. The oaks have not stopped their underground negotiations.

What you feel, standing there, is not nothing. It is, if Stein is right, a genuine perceptual act, the meeting of your interiority with another. If Ruyer is right, there is something in the turtle that is doing something not entirely unlike what you are doing: orienting toward its own form, surveying its situation, being present to its own being. If Bergson is right, the turtle is carrying a duration, a history, a lived past that shapes this present moment of its encounter with you.

None of this requires you to believe that the turtle is having human thoughts, or that the oak is happy or sad when you walk by, or that the crow is pondering your moral character (though I am genuinely uncertain about that last one). It requires only that you take the feeling seriously, not as projection, not as sentimentality, but as perception. As the beginning of a different kind of attention to the world we actually inhabit.

The Piedmont here in South Carolina is full of subjects, their histories, and lived time. We have always lived among them. Learning to meet them, without collapsing the difference or dismissing the encounter, is perhaps the oldest spiritual practice there is.

What the Black Walnut Knows

My teacher / friend / kin / Juglans nigra

I have been intently watching the black walnut in our backyard for just over a year, and I am still not sure I know what it is doing.

That sentence probably sounds strange. We have words for what trees do, from photosynthesis and transpiration to allelopathy and mast production, and the black walnut is particularly well-documented in this regard. Its roots secrete juglone, a toxic chemical compound that harms many neighboring plants, meaning it does not merely occupy space but actively shapes the community around it. It is doing something, in the measurable sense. We have instruments for this.

But I mean something else by the question. I mean, what is the walnut doing from the inside?

I started “tracking” (being with) this tree as part of a graduate seminar in my PhD studies in January 2025, a practice of almost daily observation, written reflection, or just sitting “with.” The assignment was simple enough at the time… return to the same organism at the same location over an extended period of time and attend carefully. No agenda. No hypothesis to confirm. Just attention, sustained and patient, as a discipline in itself.

What I did not expect was how much of that practice would consist of watching the tree appear to do nothing.

Through November and into December, the walnut shed its compound leaves in long, slow stages, the leaflets dropping before the central stalk, the stalks yellowing and releasing one by one until the branches stood bare against the gray Piedmont sky. January brought ice once and a good deal of snow yet again, a glaze that made the bark look lacquered, every ridge and furrow filled with light. February was mostly stillness. I would stand at the edge of the yard in the cold and take notes and feel, some mornings, faintly absurd… a man in his late 40’s with a notebook watching a dormant tree, waiting for something that might not come.

The bark was the only thing that changed, and then only when it rained. The walnut’s bark is deeply furrowed, almost architectural in its ridging, dark gray-brown in dry weather. When rain comes, the furrows darken first, then the ridges, the whole surface shifting toward black, toward something that looks almost wet and alive in a way the dry bark does not. I began to look forward to rainy mornings specifically. The tree seemed more present to itself somehow, more legible, though I could not have said what it was saying.

Then, this past week, in early April, the first buds appeared.

Not leaves just yet… just the swelling at the branch tips, a greening at the nodes, the faint suggestion of what is coming. After five months of apparent stillness, the tree is doing something visible again. And what surprised me was not the buds themselves but my response to them as something close to relief, or recognition, as if the tree had confirmed something I had been quietly doubting all winter.

Which raises the question again, in a different way. What was the walnut doing in February? Was it dormant (which is to say, was it doing nothing), or as close to nothing as a living thing can come? Or was it doing something for which we simply do not have good instruments?

The philosopher Henri Bergson spent much of his career arguing that the deepest problem in how we think about living things is that we borrow our categories from physics. We understand matter in terms of isolable parts, reversible states, and spatial positions. We understand organisms the same way as machines with components, as systems with inputs and outputs, as mechanisms whose behavior can in principle be mapped and predicted. What we lose in this borrowing, Bergson thought, is time. Not clock time, not the time we measure, but duration… the continuous, irreversible, accumulating character of a life actually being lived.

A stone has no past in the relevant sense. You could, in principle, reverse all its molecular states, and it would be the same stone. An organism cannot be reversed. It carries its history in its tissues, its timing, its chemistry. The black walnut in my yard is not the same tree it was in January, not because something dramatic has happened, but because it has continued, because duration has moved through it and left its mark in ways that no instrument fully captures.

The French philosopher Raymond Ruyer, writing in the mid-twentieth century, pushed this further. An organism, he argued, is not a surface that can be observed from outside, but it is what he called an “absolute surface,” a domain equipresent to itself, holding its own form together through something like immanent self-attention. Not a machine surveyed by an engineer. A form that surveys itself. The walnut in February, bark darkening in the rain, held its form from within and was not dormant so much as equipresent to itself in ways I was only beginning to notice.

This is what the buds in early April are telling me, I think. Not that the tree has woken up, as if it were sleeping before. But that what looked like stillness was in fact a kind of accumulated tending and the slow work of a living form carrying its past forward into a new season, doing something for which dormancy is not quite the right word.

There is a philosophical tradition, running back at least to Plotinus in the third century C.E., that holds contemplation to be not an exclusively human act but the fundamental activity of all living things. Plants, animals, even the generative forces of nature itself… all are understood, in this tradition, to produce form through a kind of silent, attentive self-coincidence. Not thinking in the way we think. But not nothing, either. A mode of presence to one’s own form, and through that form, to the whole of which it is an expression.

I find I cannot dismiss this idea when I am standing in front of the walnut in April, watching the buds swell. It is too easy, and I think finally too dishonest, to say that what the tree is doing is merely chemical, merely mechanical, merely the sum of its processes. Something in the act of sustained attention resists that reduction. Not because attention is mystical, but because it is precise — and precision, held long enough over a living thing, keeps turning up more than mechanism accounts for.

The juglone in the walnut’s roots is not random cruelty. It is a claim on the surrounding soil, a shaping of the community according to the tree’s own requirements, or, as ecologists call it, allelopathy, and what I am tempted to call, less technically, intention. Not conscious intention in the way I intend things. But a directedness. A form that knows, in some sense, what it needs and moves toward it.

I do not know what the walnut knows. I am not sure that formulation is even quite right. But after a year of watching the bare winter branches, the bark darkening in rain, the five months of apparent stillness, and now these first buds opening in early April like a sentence the tree has been composing all winter, I am less certain than I was that the question is a category error.

The tree is doing something. I am trying to learn how to see it.

The Great Turning

I’m taking The Great Turning course with Prof. Kelly at CIIS now as part of my PhD studies, and thought I’d share this incredible reflection on the life and work of Joanna Macy who co-taught the course with him and continues to have ripples of impact even though she’s passed over (and who many of us look to now as one of the guiding Ancestors even if we were never in her physical presence)…

CONSPIRING WITH JOANNA MACY – Emerge:

By whatever name, however, the new age that is upon us echoes the mythic image of a “new Heaven and new Earth” announced in the last book of the Bible. And true to the title of that last book – Apocalypse or Revelation – the new age is increasingly apocalyptic, in two senses. Most obviously, there is the prospect of worldwide devastation through the mutually reinforcing processes of global heating, mass extinction, and civilizational collapse. Paradoxically, but true as well to the etymology of the word “apocalypse,” the new age is also one where the veil has been lifted, and the fundamental truth of interbeing and the revelation of our common cosmic and Gaian origins and destiny is obvious for those with eyes to see. Tragically, however, there are still many who do not see, blinded as they are by the three poisons of hatred, greed, and delusion…

The Great Turning is not an alternative to collapse, but a passage through. As an evolving vision and commitment, it shapes and ripens us as we make our way through the rubble of industrial growth society. This passage can be seen as a kind of planetary initiation, a collective rite of passage to the possibility, at least, of a human culture in harmony with a greater life of Gaia, and through whom we have our being. (Kelly and Macy 2021, p. 207)

Elephant Time, Bergson’s Duration, and the Possibility of Empathy

I’ve always wondered how squirrels experience time. Is time an essential expression of the universe or emergent from other factors? What about whales or black walnut trees? Microbes or orchids?

I came across a fascinating article/podcast about how elephants might experience time last night. The discussion of research by Khatijah Rahmat, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, explores what she calls “elephant temporality.”

Instead of assuming that animals experience time in ways that mirror our own, Rahmat asks a different question. What if elephants inhabit their own forms of duration? Not simply a faster or slower version of human time, but something structured through memory, ecology, and social life in ways that may not align with the rhythms we impose on the world.

Rahmat organizes her research around three overlapping dimensions: individual history, eco cultural identity, and what she calls human impacted time. The categories themselves are less important than what they point toward. Elephants are not simply products of biology or instinct. They accumulate experience across long lives. They inherit patterns of movement and orientation from older members of their herds. Their lives unfold within landscapes that hold memory across generations.

Rahmat is careful to say that we cannot claim direct access to how elephants experience time subjectively. Temporal experience cannot be observed directly. It appears through signs. Through behavior, social organization, and relationships with place. But those signs are not imaginary. The patterns they reveal are real.

One example from her work is particularly interesting to me. In the Belum rainforest of Malaysia, Indigenous communities have lived alongside wild elephants for centuries. The relationship is not built on management or control but on attentiveness. Local communities have learned which seasons bring elephants to particular fruiting trees. When those seasons arrive, people avoid those areas. The elephants come and feed. The humans yield space.

There is no contract and no shared language. Yet over generations something like an understanding has developed. Rahmat calls these patterns “agreements,” and the word is surprisingly precise. It describes a stable rhythm of coexistence that has formed through long mutual attention to each other’s movements through time.

For anyone familiar with Henri Bergson‘s work, this begins to sound very familiar (I’ve been doing a lot of work and research on Bergson lately, so it obviously stood out to me).

Bergson spent much of his career arguing that the way modern societies measure time is not the way time is actually lived. Clocks divide time into equal segments that can be counted and compared. Lived experience does not unfold that way (hence his famous or infamous debate with Einstein about relativity). Real time, he argued, is durée, or duration.

Duration is a flowing continuity in which the past remains present within the moment we are living now. Memory accumulates inside perception. Experience thickens rather than advancing in neat units. Time, in this sense, is not a series of separate instants but an ongoing movement in which past and present interpenetrate.

If Bergson is right, then it becomes possible that different forms of life inhabit different durations. Time is not a universal grid imposed equally on every living being. It is something lived through bodies, memories, relationships, and environments.

An elephant that remembers distant watering holes from decades earlier, that follows migration routes learned from older matriarchs, and that responds to slow ecological rhythms may be inhabiting a form of duration that looks very different from the accelerated schedules that structure much of human life today.

Rahmat’s three dimensions also explore this possibility. Eco-cultural identity describes the way elephants inherit patterns of movement and knowledge that function almost like cultural traditions. Individual history describes the accumulation of experiences each elephant carries throughout its life, including memories and trauma. Human-impacted time describes what happens when the temporal rhythms of industrial development collide with the slower durations through which elephants and ecosystems have evolved.

When a forest corridor disappears in a single generation, what vanishes is not only habitat. Something else is disrupted as well. The orientation of a herd toward a landscape that once held meaning for them.

Research by the psychologist Gay A. Bradshaw helps make this visible in unsettling ways. Bradshaw has studied elephant herds that lost their matriarchs to poaching and found behavioral patterns that resemble trauma responses observed in humans. Younger elephants in those herds exhibited heightened aggression, unstable social relationships, and behaviors that fell outside the normal patterns of elephant societies.

The matriarch was not simply the oldest member of the herd. She carried decades of memory. She knew where water could be found during drought. She remembered the histories of neighboring herds. She guided the group through landscapes using knowledge no other elephant possessed. When she was lost, something more than an individual life disappeared. A storehouse of collective memory was removed. Part of the herd’s temporal world collapsed with her.

This is where Edith Stein‘s phenomenology of empathy becomes helpful.

Stein argued that empathy is the way we encounter another center of experience without collapsing it into our own. When we empathize with another person, we do not literally enter their consciousness. Instead, we perceive expressions, gestures, and actions that reveal the presence of another subject who experiences the world differently from us.

Empathy is not projection. It is a disciplined attentiveness to the fact that another interior life exists.

What Stein describes philosophically, Rahmat approaches methodologically. She cannot step inside elephant experience. But she can follow the traces that point toward it. The matriarch’s memory. The seasonal agreements between elephants and human communities. The visible disruption that occurs when those relational patterns are broken.

These behaviors become the ways interior life shows itself. Seen in this light, careful attention to those patterns is not sentimentalism. It is a form of perception.

Rahmat describes moments watching elephants in the Belum rainforest as dusk settled along the roadside. The elephants would approach to warm themselves along the edge of the pavement. What struck her was how clearly they could assess her presence. If she turned off her headlights, they remained calm and continued feeding.

Without language, a kind of communication unfolded.

She struggled to describe what was happening without reaching toward words like subjectivity or shared understanding. Yet calling it elephant “personhood” did not quite fit either, since that still frames the animal world through human categories. What she sensed was something else. Another form of life unfolding alongside her own. Another duration moving through the same landscape.

This has implications for conservation that reach deeper than policy discussions usually allow.

Environmental policy tends to operate within relatively short human timeframes. Planning cycles extend across years or perhaps a few decades. Political systems often shorten those horizons even further.

Yet elephants and the ecosystems they inhabit operate within much longer durations. Migration routes can extend across centuries of learned behavior. Herd structures depend on matriarchs whose memories anchor the group’s survival strategies. Landscapes themselves develop through slow ecological processes unfolding across generations.

When those landscapes disappear within a single generation, something more than habitat is lost. Entire temporal worlds are disrupted. The knowledge embedded in migration routes no longer has a landscape in which to function. The accumulated experience within a herd loses the ecological context that once gave it meaning.

Even the quiet agreements that formed between species over centuries can vanish without anyone realizing they were there.

In that sense, conservation may require us to think not only about protecting space or population numbers, but about protecting duration itself. Living beings inhabit temporal relationships with places that extend far beyond our immediate planning horizons. When those relationships are broken, forms of life built on long memory and ecological continuity are fractured in ways we are only beginning to understand.

One of the quieter tragedies of modern culture is how completely mechanical time has shaped our perception of the world. Schedules, productivity systems, and digital calendars encourage us to treat time as a sequence of units to be managed and optimized. That framework has practical advantages, but it also narrows our awareness of the many temporal worlds unfolding around us.

Forests grow in decades. Rivers reshape landscapes across centuries. Elephant herds carry knowledge across generations. These are not poetic exaggerations. They are reminders that life unfolds within durations that clocks cannot fully capture.

If Bergson helps us recognize the thickness of lived time, and Stein helps us understand how empathy allows us to encounter other centers of experience, then Rahmat’s research invites us to extend those insights beyond the human sphere. Elephants are living within temporal structures that we only partially perceive, yet those structures are no less real for that reason.

Learning to notice those different temporalities may be one of the most important ecological skills we can cultivate. It requires patience, attentiveness, and a willingness to admit that the world contains many ways of inhabiting time.

And once we begin to notice that, it becomes harder to believe that the human clock is the only one that matters. Somewhere tonight a herd is moving toward water remembered decades earlier.

Edith Stein and the Lost Art of Understanding Another Being

We often talk about empathy as if it were simply a moral virtue. We tell children to “be more empathetic,” or we describe someone as lacking empathy when they seem indifferent to the suffering of others. Empathy, in this everyday sense, becomes something like kindness or compassion.

But for the philosopher Edith Stein and, later, as the Carmelite St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, empathy was something much deeper. It was not primarily a moral instruction. It was a structure of perception.

Stein (1891–1942) was a German phenomenologist and a student of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. In her early philosophical work On the Problem of Empathy (1917), she explored a deceptively simple question: How do we know that another person has a mind at all?

After all, we never directly experience another person’s inner life. I cannot feel your thoughts. I cannot directly access your emotions or sensations. All I ever encounter is your presence in the world: your gestures, your voice, your expressions, your actions.

And yet we rarely doubt that other people are conscious.

We move through the world constantly encountering others as beings who perceive, feel, hope, suffer, and rejoice. Stein wanted to understand how this is possible.

Her answer was empathy. She writes:

“Empathy is the experience of foreign consciousness in general.”
— Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy

That phrase may sound abstract at first, but Stein’s insight is actually quite intuitive. When we see someone wince in pain, we do not simply observe a physical movement. Nor do we literally feel their pain ourselves. Instead, we encounter their expression as the expression of another experiencing subject. Their suffering appears to us as theirs.

Empathy, in this sense, is neither emotional projection nor detached observation. It is the way consciousness recognizes another center of experience. It is how the presence of another mind becomes visible in the world.

And importantly, Stein insists that empathy always preserves difference. When I empathize with another person, I do not become them. Their experience remains irreducibly theirs. Empathy allows us to approach another’s experience without collapsing it into our own. This small philosophical insight carries enormous implications.

Because if empathy is a structure of perception, then the ethical life begins long before moral decisions are made. It begins with how we see. Before we decide how to treat another being, we must first encounter them as a being at all. In my opinion, that may be where many of our contemporary problems begin.

We live in a moment shaped by powerful technologies, accelerating ecological crises, political fragmentation, and deep cultural anxiety. In response, many discussions revolve around solutions: better policies, better systems, better innovations.

But beneath these debates lies a quieter crisis. It is a crisis of perception. More and more of the world appears to us as background… as resource… as infrastructure… as data.

Other people become categories. Landscapes become economic zones. Forests become board-feet of timber. Rivers become a water supply. The world flattens into utility.

Stein’s philosophy points in the opposite direction. She reminds us that our most basic encounter with reality is not with objects but with presences. We are constantly surrounded by other centers of life. However, this does not apply only to human beings.

Anyone who has spent time closely observing animals, forests, or even a single tree begins to notice how quickly the language of “objects” breaks down. The living world presses back against our assumptions. It asks to be encountered differently.

In my own small way, I experience this most mornings sitting near the black walnut tree in my backyard here in Spartanburg. I am not imagining that the tree possesses consciousness in the human sense. But the encounter still shifts something in perception. The tree ceases to be merely part of the scenery. Its form, its rhythms, its seasonal changes begin to register as expressions of a living presence. The experience is subtle but unmistakable. The world becomes populated again.

Stein helps us understand why this matters. Empathy, properly understood, is not simply a feeling we extend toward others. It is a capacity that allows us to perceive the world as filled with beings whose lives unfold alongside our own.

And once that perception awakens, the ethical implications follow naturally.

If the world is full of beings who experience life in their own ways, then the question of how we live together becomes unavoidable. Ethics grows organically from perception. But if perception collapses… if everything appears merely as matter to be manipulated… then empathy fades before ethics even has a chance to begin. This is why phenomenology still matters today.

Husserl, Stein, Merleau-Ponty, and others in the phenomenological tradition were not merely interested in abstract philosophy. They were trying to recover something that modern life had begun to obscure: the richness of lived experience and the relational character of reality.

Stein’s work on empathy remains one of the clearest windows into that project. She reminds us that the world is not made up only of things. It is made up of encounters. Perhaps in a time defined by distance, screens, distraction, and abstraction, recovering that simple insight is more important than ever.

Empathy, in Stein’s sense, is not sentimental. It is perceptual. It is the quiet realization that we are never alone in the world we inhabit.

The Overstory

Reading The Overstory felt less like moving through a novel and more like being slowly re-schooled in perception. Which is something I study intently, so the book was an ongoing wonderful surprise (much as its structure itself).

Richard Powers does not simply tell stories about trees here, but rearranges the conditions under which we notice them at all through various timelines (some that fracture) and characters. I wasn’t sure what I was reading for the first few hours, but the unfolding leaves of the book flowered over time.

Early in the book, one of the most quietly destabilizing lines appears:

“The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind.”

That line could easily pass as a reflection on politics (especially currently) or culture, and became an entry in my own notebook. But within the arc of the novel, it becomes ecological. The crisis is not primarily informational. It is perceptual. We do not fail to act because we lack data. We fail because we do not see.

This is where the novel began to move into territory that those of us working in phenomenology and ecological theology will recognize immediately. Powers is not asking us to care more about trees, and this is not a tree-huggers’ guide to discourse. He is asking us to experience the field of relation differently, in which care might even arise.

Another moment comes when the text reminds us:

“This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees.”

That reversal landed with philosophical force for me. It unsettles the background assumption that the human is the measure of belonging on this planet. Trees are not an object of the landscape. They are participants in the very conditions that make landscapes, histories, and even narratives possible.

In this sense, The Overstory mirrors the kind of ecological intentionality I have been trying to tease out in my own work and writings. The novel dramatizes what Edith Stein might call the givenness of another’s reality, not as projection, not as abstraction, but as presence that precedes our categories. The trees in Powers’ narrative are never romanticized into human likeness. Nor are they reduced to inert matter. They are encountered as beings whose temporalities, communicative capacities, and communalities exceed our usual frames.

At one point, the novel observes:

“The tree is really a kind of massively branched, above-ground root.”

The sentence is biologically true. Yet, it also works metaphysically. It dissolves our habit of separating what is visible from what sustains. The forest becomes less a collection of individuals and more a process of relation.

Process thought and panpsychism came to my mind many times as well. Whitehead’s sense that reality consists of interdependent occasions rather than isolated substances finds narrative embodiment here, with connections appearing from the soil of the novel in curious ways. No character stands alone. Each life is drawn into wider systems of exchange, decay, regeneration, and memory.

Memory is central throughout the book. Powers repeatedly insists that trees are temporal beings whose scale stretches beyond our narrative patience. One of the most haunting insights comes in the simple observation:

“Trees pass messages to one another through the air.”

The novel treats this not as a metaphor but as an ecological truth. Chemical signaling, fungal networks, shared stress responses. Yet what matters is less the mechanism than the invitation. If communication extends beyond language, then relation extends beyond recognition.

This is where the book becomes moving rather than merely informative in my opinion (though the opening 1/3 with character vignettes is superbly done).

We begin to sense that our estrangement from the more-than-human world is not caused by distance but by habit in the phenomenological sense. We have trained our perception to notice speed, novelty, and control. Trees operate through slowness, repetition, and persistence. They are, in Powers’ framing, beings whose stories unfold on temporal scales that challenge narrative closure and who live much longer than humans.

In a line that feels almost like a thesis for the whole work, we are told:

“The seeds of things are in trees.”

Not just biological seeds, but imaginative ones. The possibility of another way of inhabiting the world.

The novel does not pretend that this shift of perception or attention is easy. The human characters struggle, fail, and fracture, as do some of the timelines. Some become activists, some become disillusioned, some turn inward, and some choose to end their human lives. Yet across these divergent arcs runs a shared realization that the world we inhabit has never been exclusively ours.

There’s a common refrain harkening back to Ovid’s Metamorphosis:

Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.

For me, the most powerful effect of The Overstory was the way it mirrors the experience of sitting with a particular tree over time. The black walnut I have been tracking in my own work comes to mind. Powers captures that strange sensation that the longer one attends, the less the tree appears as an object and the more it becomes a presence that gathers relations.

In one passage, the novel notes:

“People aren’t the apex species they think they are.”

The line is not accusatory. It is clarifying. It suggests that our dominance has always depended on a background we barely perceive.

What the novel offers, finally, is not an argument but a reorientation. It does not insist that trees are sacred in a theological sense. Yet it quietly renders them neighborly in a phenomenological one with a story to tell us if we have ears to hear.

And once that shift occurs, the ethical implications follow without coercion.

The brilliance of The Overstory lies in this restraint. It does not preach (as some reviewers on subreddits hold). It attends. It does not collapse human suffering into ecological process, nor does it elevate the nonhuman into sentimental purity. Instead, it invites us to inhabit a layered world where grief, endurance, and regeneration are shared conditions.

It leaves us with a sense that the crisis we face is not simply environmental but relational. We have forgotten how to perceive participation.

Powers helps us remember.

Presentation at Yale on “Returning to the Roots: Edith Stein, Empathy, and Ecological Intentionality”

Here’s my full presentation for Yale Divinity’s 2026 Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology that was held last week (February 2026)… what a great time to be back at Yale Divinity after graduating in 2002!

Roots of Cruciform Consciousness: Edith Stein, Empathy, and the Ground of Ecological Intentionality

Sam Harrelson, PhD Student, California Institute of Integral Studies
Yale Graduate Conference on Religion and Ecology
February 2026

The theme of this gathering invites us to consider whether what we need for the future might already lie beneath our feet. Such language can easily be heard metaphorically, pointing toward ancestral wisdom, inherited traditions, or the rediscovery of forgotten practices. Yet phenomenologically, the claim may be more literal and methodological than it first appears. What lies beneath our feet is not only soil or memory but the perceptual ground through which the world becomes meaningful at all. The question of roots is therefore not only historical or ecological but experiential. It concerns how the world appears to us, and how we appear within it.

This paper proposes that Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy offers a way to rethink ecological consciousness precisely at this level of perception. Stein’s account of empathy, developed in her early work On the Problem of Empathy, does more than explain how one human being understands another. It articulates the structure through which another center of experience becomes present to consciousness at all. When considered in light of contemporary ecological crisis, Stein’s analysis suggests that the breakdown we face is not only technological, political, or economic. It is also perceptual. The challenge before us may therefore involve not simply new policies or innovations, but a re-rooting of awareness itself.

Empathy as the Disclosure of Another Life

Stein famously resists two common misunderstandings of empathy. Empathy is neither projection nor inference. It is not the imaginative insertion of myself into another’s position, nor is it a logical deduction based on external signs. Instead, empathy is a distinctive intentional act in which another’s experience is given to me as genuinely theirs. I encounter the other not as an extension of myself, nor as a merely observable object, but as a subject whose interior life is present while remaining irreducibly other.

This formulation is subtle but decisive. Empathy preserves difference while establishing relation. It allows proximity without collapse, recognition without possession. The other’s experience appears as both accessible and inexhaustible. I grasp something of their joy, suffering, or intention, yet never exhaust it. Their life exceeds my comprehension even as it becomes present to me.

What is often overlooked is that Stein does not treat empathy primarily as a moral achievement. It is not first a virtue or emotional capacity. Rather, empathy belongs to the ontological structure of consciousness itself. The world we inhabit is never neutral or empty. It is always already populated by other living centers of activity whose presence shapes the field of experience. Empathy, in this sense, is not an optional addition to human life but a basic condition for the appearance of a shared world.

Seen from this perspective, empathy precedes ethics. It grounds the possibility of ethics by disclosing that we do not inhabit the world alone. The recognition of another’s interiority is not a later interpretive step but an original feature of how the world shows up at all.

Ecological Crisis as Perceptual Crisis

If Stein is right, then the ecological crisis may be understood partly as a crisis in this very structure of perception. The devastation of ecosystems is not only the result of poor management or technological excess. It is also enabled by a way of seeing in which the natural world appears primarily as an object rather than as a community.

Forests become timber, rivers become resources, soil becomes substrate, and landscapes appear as inventories of use-value rather than as living fields of relation. In phenomenological terms, the world is flattened into availability. Once this perceptual reduction takes hold, exploitation follows almost inevitably. What no longer appears as expressive or relational becomes disposable.

This does not mean that ecological destruction results simply from individual failures of empathy. Rather, it suggests that modern technological culture has cultivated a habitual mode of perception in which relational presence is systematically obscured. The more-than-human world becomes intelligible primarily through abstraction, measurement, and utility. The experiential sense of encountering other forms of life as centers of activity recedes from view.

Stein’s phenomenology offers a way to articulate what has been lost. If empathy is the structure through which another life becomes present, then ecological renewal may require not only new forms of governance but renewed perception. The task is not to sentimentalize nature or project human consciousness onto nonhuman beings. It is to recover the capacity to encounter the world as populated by lives that exceed our own perspective.

Toward Ecological Intentionality

To name this possibility, I use the term ecological intentionality. In phenomenological language, intentionality refers to the directedness of consciousness toward the world. Ecological intentionality designates a mode of awareness oriented not toward mastery or control but toward participatory belonging.

Such intentionality recognizes that existence unfolds within networks of interdependence. Living beings present themselves as centers of activity whose interior dynamics cannot be reduced to mechanical explanation alone. Their life is not identical to ours, yet neither is it merely inert. Stein’s careful distinction between empathy and projection is crucial here. We need not claim to fully understand another life in order to acknowledge that it exceeds objecthood.

Ecological intentionality, therefore, involves a shift in posture rather than an expansion of knowledge. It is less about acquiring new information and more about recovering a different way of encountering what is already present. The world begins to appear again as a field of relations in which we are participants rather than external observers.

The Cruciform Pattern of Ecological Life

At this point, the cross can be reexamined phenomenologically. Within Christian theology, the cross is often interpreted primarily as the site of human redemption or divine sacrifice. Yet it can also be read more broadly as a pattern of relational existence. The cross marks the intersection of vulnerability and renewal, finitude and transformation. It signifies that life does not persist by escaping death but through processes that pass through it.

When viewed in ecological terms, this pattern becomes strikingly familiar. Soil forms through decay. Forest ecosystems depend upon cycles of decomposition and regeneration. Nutrients circulate through networks of exchange among fungi, plants, animals, and microorganisms. Life flourishes not despite finitude but through it. Descent into the earth becomes the condition for new emergence.

The cruciform pattern therefore resonates with the very processes unfolding beneath our feet. It names a structure in which loss and renewal, limitation and possibility, are inseparable. Such a reading does not reduce theology to biology or vice versa. Instead, it reveals a shared logic of relational becoming that traverses both domains.

Embodiment, Finitude, and Participation

Stein’s later philosophical and spiritual writings deepen this ecological resonance. In Finite and Eternal Being, she portrays the human person as simultaneously grounded in finitude and opened toward transcendence. This openness does not remove us from the world but situates us more deeply within it. Embodiment is not an obstacle to spiritual life but its very condition.

Through our bodies, we are always already embedded within networks of dependence. We breathe air shaped by ecosystems, consume food produced through soil and climate, and live within material processes we neither originate nor control. Finitude, for Stein, is not deficiency but location. To be finite is to be situated, and to be situated is to belong.

Her reflections in The Science of the Cross extend this insight into explicitly theological territory. Transformation occurs not through domination or escape but through participation in patterns of vulnerability and love. Read ecologically, this suggests that the way forward lies not in transcending earthly conditions but in entering them more fully. The acceptance of interdependence becomes the ground of spiritual as well as ecological maturity.

Place-Based Attention

These themes remain abstract unless they are anchored in lived experience. For me, this anchoring occurs quite literally in the Carolina Piedmont, where I live and work. As part of my research practice, I track the seasonal rhythms of a black walnut tree in my yard. Over the course of the year, I watch its cycles of dormancy, budding, leafing, fruiting, and decay.

Such observation does not transform the tree into a human subject. Yet neither does it remain a mere object. It appears instead as a living center of activity whose rhythms intersect with mine. Its shade shapes my summer afternoons. Its leaves enrich the soil each autumn. Birds and insects inhabit its branches. Time itself becomes visible through its changes.

This practice does not solve climate change or halt biodiversity loss. But it reconfigures perception. The tree ceases to be a resource or backdrop and becomes a participant in a shared field of life. Stein’s phenomenology helps articulate what occurs in such moments. Empathy, understood broadly as the disclosure of another center of life, makes possible a renewed sense of belonging within the world.

Returning to the Roots

To return to the roots, then, is not primarily to recover a lost past. It is to return to the participatory ground of perception itself. When this ground is obscured, the world appears inert and disposable. When it is recovered, the world appears again as expressive, relational, and alive.

From this perspective, ecological responsibility no longer presents itself merely as an external obligation imposed by ethical systems or environmental policies. It emerges instead as the natural expression of inhabiting a shared world. The recognition of belonging precedes and grounds the call to care.

In this sense, what we need may indeed already lie beneath our feet. Not only in the soil and its intricate networks of life, but in the deeper phenomenological roots through which the world first becomes present to us at all.

References

Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Trans. Waltraut Stein. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989.

Stein, Edith. Finite and Eternal Being. Trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.

Stein, Edith. The Science of the Cross. Trans. Josephine Koeppel. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.

History as Empathic Ecology: Edith Stein and the Practice of Ecological Empathy

There are moments in academic life when a concept stops being merely theoretical and becomes a lived practice. My presentation this past week at Christendom College’s Eternity In Time (Thinking With the Church Through History) conference on Edith Stein and what I’ve been calling ecological empathy has been one of those moments for me. My conference presentation is below if you’d like to read it, and I’ll post the full, longer paper shortly.

What began as a phenomenological question about how we know another’s experience is real has slowly widened into a question about how we inhabit history, land, and the more-than-human world at all.

Stein’s early work On the Problem of Empathy is often read within psychology or philosophy of mind. But her insight cuts much deeper. Empathy, for Stein, is not projection and not detached observation (probably my best post about this concept so far). It is a distinctive act in which another’s experience becomes present to me as other. I do not become the other, and I do not reduce them to an object. Instead, I encounter a real center of experience that exceeds me.

This structure has profound implications beyond interpersonal ethics. It suggests that knowing is always relational, always asymmetrical, and always grounded in encounter rather than mastery.

From Historical Method to Empathic Participation

In my talk, I suggested that if we take Stein seriously, history itself becomes an empathic practice.

Modern historical method often imagines itself as neutral reconstruction: gather sources, analyze context, produce explanation. But Stein’s phenomenology invites a different posture. The past is not merely a dataset. It is the trace of lived experience. To study history responsibly is therefore not just to explain events but to encounter the lives, intentions, and worlds that once unfolded within them.

This does not mean sentimental identification. Stein explicitly resists that. Instead, it means acknowledging that historical understanding involves a disciplined openness to experiences that are irreducibly not our own.

History, in this sense, becomes a form of relational knowledge… a practice of attending to the presence of others across time.

The Creaturely Horizon

Where this becomes especially compelling for my own work is when we widen the circle of empathy beyond human history.

If empathy is the recognition of another center of experience that is not reducible to me, then ecological awareness begins to look like an expansion of empathic perception. Landscapes, species, watersheds, and ecosystems are not simply backdrops to human drama. They are fields of lived processes, histories, and agencies that exceed human intention.

This is what I’ve been calling the creaturely horizon. It is the recognition that human life always unfolds within a wider community of beings whose existence is not defined by our narratives, economies, or theologies, even though those systems constantly attempt to do just that.

Here in the Carolina Piedmont, this is not abstract. The Pacolet (and Tyger) watershed near our home carries layers of agricultural history, Indigenous displacement, industrial transformation, and ongoing ecological stress. To walk along its edges is to encounter not just scenery but a dense historical and ecological presence. The river is not an object of study alone. It is a participant in a shared world.

Ecological empathy begins precisely at this point: when perception shifts from viewing land as resource to encountering it as a living historical partner.

Empathy, Ecology, and the Limits of Control

One of Stein’s most important contributions is her insistence that empathy preserves difference. The other never becomes fully transparent to me. There is always excess, always depth, always opacity.

Ecologically, this insight is crucial.

Many environmental crises emerge from the illusion that the world can be fully known, predicted, and controlled. Industrial agriculture, extractive economies, and technocratic planning all rely on the assumption that complexity can be reduced to manageable variables.

Stein’s phenomenology undermines this posture at its root. If genuine knowing involves encountering another reality that exceeds my grasp, then ecological knowledge must also involve humility. The more we understand ecosystems, the more we encounter their irreducible complexity.

Ecological empathy therefore does not produce domination. It produces attentiveness, patience, and restraint.

It shifts the question from “How do we manage this system?” to “How do we live responsibly within a world that is not ours alone?”

Toward an Ecological Practice of History

This perspective also reframes the study of Church history, theology, and religious tradition, which has been central to my recent work.

Too often, religious history is narrated as a story of doctrines, institutions, or human conflicts. But if we read it empathically and ecologically, we begin to see something else: traditions emerge within landscapes, climates, agricultural systems, and material constraints. Monastic rhythms follow seasonal cycles. Liturgical calendars mirror ecological time. Theologies of creation reflect lived encounters with land and weather as much as abstract metaphysics.

To study religious history responsibly is therefore to attend not only to texts and ideas but to the ecological worlds in which they were lived.

History, then, becomes not just human memory but a layered field of creaturely relations.

Ecological Empathy as Spiritual Practice

For me, this is not only an academic argument. It is also a spiritual practice.

Ecological empathy begins in small acts of attention. Watching how light changes across the backyard in late afternoon. Noticing the seasonal shifts in the black walnut tree I’ve been tracking. Listening to the sounds of insects returning in early spring. These are not sentimental exercises. They are ways of training perception to recognize the presence of other lives unfolding alongside ours.

Stein helps clarify that empathy is not something we manufacture emotionally. It is something we cultivate perceptually. It begins with learning to encounter others as real.

In a time of ecological crisis, this shift may be more urgent than any policy proposal. Laws and technologies matter. But without transformed perception, they remain fragile.

Ecological empathy invites us to inhabit the world differently… not as managers standing outside it, but as participants within a shared, creaturely history.

Conference Presentation Text

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

Sam Harrelson
Christendom College, Feb 2026

Conference Presentation Script

Good afternoon, and thank you for the invitation to be part of this conversation.

Pope Francis recently called for a renewed study of Church history, warning against what he described as an “overly angelic conception of the Church,” one that forgets her spots, wrinkles, and historical embeddedness. His concern is not simply methodological. It is pastoral and ethical. If the Church forgets her historical entanglement with the world, she risks forgetting her responsibility within it.

Today I want to suggest that Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy offers a surprisingly powerful way to rethink what it means to study Church history at all. My claim is simple:
If we take Stein seriously, history becomes not only an intellectual discipline but also an empathetic practice… and potentially an ecological one.

Stein’s early work On the Problem of Empathy asks a deceptively basic question: how do we know another’s experience is real?

Her answer resists both projection and detachment. Empathy, for Stein, is neither imagining the other as myself nor observing them as an object. It is a distinctive act in which another’s experience is given to me as genuinely theirs… irreducibly other, yet meaningfully accessible.

Empathy therefore has structure. It involves:

First, the recognition of another as a subject.
Second, an entry into the meaning of their experience.
And third, a return to oneself, now transformed by that encounter.

This is not merely psychology. It is a phenomenology of relational knowing. We come to truth not by standing outside relationships, but by entering them responsibly.

What happens if we bring this insight into the study of Church history?

Too often, historical study oscillates between two poles.

On one side, there is triumphalist narration: the Church as a seamless unfolding of divine purpose.
On the other, there is purely critical detachment: the Church as a sociological object to be explained from the outside.

Both approaches, in different ways, fail Stein’s test. One collapses alterity into ideology. The other refuses encounter altogether.

A Steinian approach to Church history would instead treat the past as something we must empathically encounter.

To study a council, a missionary movement, a devotional practice, or a theological dispute is not only to catalog events. It is to ask:
What worlds of meaning were lived here?
What fears, hopes, and constraints shaped these actions?
What forms of life were made possible… and what forms were foreclosed?

History, in this sense, becomes an act of disciplined attentiveness to lived experience across time.

But Stein’s framework pushes us further than this.

Because once empathy is understood as an openness to real otherness, we face a deeper question:

Who counts as the “other” in historical understanding?

Stein herself focuses primarily on human persons. Yet the structure she identifies does not logically stop there. The Church’s history has always unfolded not only among human actors but within landscapes, climates, material resources, animals, and built environments.

The monasteries of medieval Europe were shaped by forests, rivers, and agricultural cycles.

Missionary expansion often followed trade routes, mineral extraction, and imperial ecologies.

Liturgical art depends on pigments, wood, stone, and labor drawn from specific places.

These are not background conditions. They are part of the creaturely field in which Christian history becomes possible.

If Stein teaches us that knowledge requires acknowledging the real presence of the other, then historical study must also attend to these more-than-human participants in the Church’s story.

This is what I call empathic ecology… or, in my broader work, ecological intentionality.

Here the tradition itself offers companions for Stein.

Hildegard of Bingen’s notion of viriditas, the greening vitality of creation, portrays divine life as manifest in the flourishing of the natural world. For Hildegard, spiritual history and ecological vitality are inseparable.

In contemporary theology, Leonardo Boff’s integral ecology similarly insists that Christian ethics cannot be disentangled from the well-being of Earth’s systems and communities.

Stein provides the phenomenological grammar that helps explain why these insights matter methodologically. If understanding requires empathic openness to real others, then historical truth demands attention not only to human intentions but to the material and ecological conditions that co-shaped them.

Let me offer one brief example.

In the nineteenth century, European engagement with the ancient Near East brought Assyrian reliefs and artifacts into Western museums and theological discourse. These objects were treated as confirmations of biblical history and symbols of civilizational continuity.

Yet their removal also depended on imperial infrastructures, environmental extraction, and the displacement of local cultural ecologies. The Church’s encounter with these artifacts cannot be understood fully without recognizing the ecological and political networks that enabled their movement.

A purely doctrinal history might note the apologetic value of these discoveries.
A purely political history might critique imperial appropriation.

A Steinian, empathic-ecological history asks something more layered:
What worlds of meaning were opened and closed here… for scholars, for local communities, and for the landscapes themselves?

Such questions do not dilute historical rigor. They deepen it.

What does this mean for Catholic higher education today?

If Church history is taught merely as a sequence of events or doctrines, students may inherit either nostalgia or cynicism.

But if history is taught as an empathic encounter with the lived, creaturely reality of the Church across time, it can cultivate something else entirely: humility, responsibility, and solidarity.

Students begin to see that the Church’s past is not an untouchable monument. It is a field of relationships still shaping our present obligations.

In this way, historical study becomes formative rather than merely informative. It trains perception. It forms conscience. It prepares a mode of witness that is less triumphalist and more cruciform… grounded in attention to vulnerability, interdependence, and the real costs of historical action.

Let me close with this thought.

Edith Stein teaches that empathy is not sentimental identification. It is a disciplined openness to the reality of another. It changes how we know, and therefore how we act.

If we bring that insight into the study of Church history, we may discover that the task is not simply to remember what the Church has done.

The deeper task is to learn how to perceive the Church’s past truthfully… within the full web of human and creaturely relations that made it possible.

Such perception does not weaken faith. It grounds it.

And perhaps this is precisely what Pope Francis is asking of us:
not a history that idealizes the Church,
but one that helps the Church inhabit time… and the living world… with deeper honesty, responsibility, and hope.

Thank you.

Three Conferences, One Thread: Preparing for Next Week’s Presentations

I’ve learned over my time as a PhD student in the Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion program at the California Institute of Integral Studies that there are seasons in academic and creative life when the work accumulates quietly. Reading stacks grow taller, my notes deepen, and ideas circle back on themselves as I continue reading and writing. Conversations with students, landscapes, and texts start forming into something I can feel taking shape long before it is spoken aloud.

And then there are weeks when those threads surface publicly, all at once!

Next week is one of those weeks, for sure. I’ll be presenting in three different conference settings across the country (while acknowledging the ecological damage caused by air travel)… beginning in Chicago (probably my favorite city, not just due to the fact that I’m a major Cubs fan), then New Haven, and finally in Virginia before heading back home to the Carolinas. Each gathering has its own audience, tone, and intellectual atmosphere, but I think all three are connected by the same underlying set of questions that have been shaping my work in recent years.

Rather than thinking of them as separate events, I’ve started to see them as three vantage points onto a shared terrain as I finalize my thoughts and slides.

DePaul Symposium: Representation, Neighbor, and Visual Ethics

February 17, 2026

The week begins in Chicago at DePaul University, where I’ll participate in a symposium organized by the Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art in partnership with the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology titled “And Who Is My Neighbor?” Refuge, Sanctuary, and Representation in Modern Art and Visual Culture.”

My presentation here (“Ecologies of Refuge: Trees, Crosses, and the Art of Neighborliness“) engages questions of perception and ethical formation through visual culture. The core concern is simple, but I think demanding… images do not merely depict worlds… they train us how to see them (channeling Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, Husserl, etc). They shape who counts as neighbor, what counts as presence, and what counts as belonging.

Also, this conference reconnects me with my long-standing interests in ancient and medieval art and museum work, but through lenses sharpened by ecological and phenomenological study. It feels less like returning to earlier territory and more like rediscovering it with different sensitivities.

Yale Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology

February 19–20

From Chicago, I head to New Haven for the 10th annual Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology at Yale Divinity School. This year’s theme, “Return to the Roots: How We Move Forward,” invites participants to reflect on ancestral, ecological, and spiritual grounding in the face of contemporary crisis.

I graduated from Yale Divinity with a MAR in Religion and Literature in 2002, so this will be a sort of homecoming to be doing academic work on campus again, rather than just visiting to see all the changes and campus improvements!

The conference is organized by graduate students and provides an interdisciplinary venue for emerging scholars to share research across theology, environmental humanities, philosophy, ethics, and related fields. It has become a meaningful meeting place within a field that seeks to reconsider how narratives and practices shape human relationships with the environment.

The theme itself asks how place-based relations and inherited traditions might tether communities to hope and guide collective futures… even posing the possibility that what sustains us may already be “right below our feet.”

My presentation is closest to the heart of my PhD work at CIIS so far. I’ll be exploring ecological intentionality as both a philosophical framework and a lived practice. Drawing on phenomenology, process thought, and local observation, my presentation presses toward a shift in which intentionality is not merely a cognitive function but a relational unfolding through environments, histories, and bodies.

This context is particularly exciting because the conference explicitly encourages interdisciplinary engagement across religion, ethics, science, and ecological practice.

Eternity in Time: Christendom College

February 20–21

My week of travel concludes in Virginia at Christendom College for the conference “Eternity in Time: Thinking with the Church Through History.” This gathering brings together scholars across the humanities to reconsider the role of historical consciousness in theological and cultural life.

The conference’s framing invites reflection on how history shapes philosophical and theological reasoning, engaging topics such as patristic thought, doctrinal development, liturgical culture, and the relationship between faith and intellectual inquiry.

I am intrigued by the idea here that historical understanding is not antiquarian. It fosters ethical responsibility and communal awareness by situating human life within temporal continuity. I think we can all take something from that insight.

My contribution here leans into theological and historical retrieval, continuing work connected to the Ecology of the Cross. I’m interested in how premodern theological imagination treated materiality, suffering, and transformation in ways that still hold interpretive potential today (Hildegard, Aquinas, and Stein).

This setting will probably offer a very different conversational atmosphere from the Yale gathering, and that difference is what makes the week meaningful when I look at the whole picture. The encounter between ecological phenomenology and historically grounded theological discourse creates productive friction. Those frictions often generate clarity in my experience.

Ongoing

Preparing these presentations simultaneously has helped me clarify that my work is not best understood as a collection of separate projects but as a continuous effort to cultivate coherence across domains that are often artificially divided… theology, ecology, perception, art, pedagogy, and history, technology (AI, etc).

So If I’m being honest, the main takeaways for me as I sharpen my dissertation focus are:

Attention as ethical practice
Perception as relational participation
Knowledge as encounter rather than extraction

I’d say these takeaways have been shaped as much by teaching in the Carolinas for almost 2 decades and by raising a family with five incredibly unique children as by seminars and research in the archives of books that should be read more. Scholarship that drifts too far from lived worlds loses vitality. I try to keep that tether intact and it’s one reason I’m glad I waited until I was 46 to begin my PhD journey (as irrational as that may sound).

There is always anticipation leading into weeks like this, but also humility. Conferences are not stages for final statements, but are provisional gatherings… spaces where ideas meet other minds and inevitably change shape.

I’m most interested in the conversations that follow the presentations. Those exchanges are where the work actually develops as I’ve learned at the American Academy of Religion, or ISSRNC, or Center for Process Studies, or Affiliate Summit, or AdTech, or Web2.0, or Society of Biblical Literature, or the numerous edu-conferences I’ve presented to over the last 25 years of my meandering career.

We are still learning how to be addressed by the worlds we inhabit, after all.

I’ll post up my slides and thoughts after the travels wind down late next week!

Plasma, Bubbles, and an Ontology of Empathy

Plasma is not a metaphor, but a problem. We don’t learn a great deal about plasma in school, but it certainly exists and is the main component of all the matter in the universe (and I’m writing this as someone who taught AP Physics, Physical Science, and Earth and Space Science for almost twenty years in various schools here in the Carolinas!). But plasma is a problem with how we imagine form, boundary, and relation, which is why it’s offloaded as “another state of matter” in our school textbooks, but not explored in depth unless you take higher-level physics courses in college. Plasma resists being treated as a thing, however. It gathers, disperses, and responds to fields. It holds structure without closure. It behaves less like an object and more like an event…patterned, responsive, never fully contained.

That resistance matters. It presses against one of the most deeply sedimented assumptions of modern thought that reality is composed of discrete, self-contained units with clear edges. Subjects here, objects there. Minds inside, world outside. Consciousness is an interior chamber from which we look out through our eyes.

Plasma doesn’t cooperate with that picture. Neither, I’m increasingly convinced, does consciousness.

Plasma is not rare or exotic. It is the most common state of matter in the universe. Stars are plasma. Auroras are plasma. Lightning traces plasma paths through the sky. Even here, close to the surface of things, plasma appears wherever energy, matter, and field interact in unstable but patterned ways. What distinguishes it is not chaos, but responsiveness. Plasma organizes itself in relation to surrounding forces. It forms filaments, sheaths, and membranes. It is structured, but never sealed.

That combination, form without closure, is one of those “not-normal” ideas about plasma that has stuck with me and causes me to be fascinated by this aspect of our cosmos.

Likewise, a bubble is not a solid thing. It is a relation held in tension (fascinating history of that term, which I’ll go into in a later post). A bubble’s boundary is “real,” but it is not a wall. It is a membrane… thin, responsive, constantly negotiating between inside and outside. A bubble exists only as long as the conditions that sustain it remain. Its form is defined by pressure, by exchange, by the delicate balance of forces it does not control. And they fascinate children who are seemingly more open to “not normal” experiences with reality.

Importantly, bubbles do not need to be isolated to remain distinct. They can cluster. They can press against one another. They can share boundaries without collapsing into sameness. Their integrity is not maintained by separation, but by tension (the Greek term tonos, which we get the word tension in English, is also connected to musical tones, which seems fitting).

I find myself wondering whether this is a better way to think about consciousness.

Much of modern philosophy and psychology still relies on a container model of mind. Consciousness is imagined as something housed inside the skull, bounded by skin, sealed off from the world except through carefully regulated inputs. Perception, on this view, is a delivery system. Empathy becomes an imaginative leap across a gap, while relation is always secondary.

But this model struggles to explain some of the most ordinary features of experience. It cannot easily account for the way moods permeate spaces, how grief lingers in landscapes, or why certain places feel charged long after an event has passed. It treats empathy as an achievement rather than a condition. And it renders the world strangely inert…a collection of objects awaiting interpretation.

Phenomenology has long resisted this picture. Thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty insist that perception is not a projection outward from an interior mind, but a participation in a shared field (again, more allusions to physics). The body is not a container for consciousness, but its mode of openness. We do not first exist as sealed subjects and then relate. We emerge through relation.

Seen this way, consciousness begins to look less like a chamber and more like a membrane. Structured, yes…but porous. Distinct, but never isolated, and sustained by relations it does not author.

This is where empathy becomes especially revealing.

Empathy is often treated as a moral virtue or an emotional skill. Something we cultivate in order to be better people. But phenomenologically, empathy appears much earlier than ethics. It is the basic experience of being addressed by another consciousness. As Edith Stein argued with remarkable precision, empathy is not emotional contagion or imaginative projection. It is the direct givenness of another’s experience as other…a presence that is not mine, yet not inaccessible.

What matters here is what empathy presupposes. It assumes that consciousness is not sealed. That there is permeability at the boundary, and one field of experience can register another without collapse or confusion. Empathy only makes sense if consciousness is already open.

In this light, empathy is not something consciousness does after the fact. It is evidence of how consciousness is structured in the first place.

This is where the image of the bubble returns with force. Consciousness, like a bubble, maintains its integrity not by hard enclosure but by responsive tension. Its boundaries are real, but they are sites of exchange. Empathy occurs at the membrane, and is where another’s presence presses close enough to be felt without being absorbed.

If this is right, then many of our ethical and ecological failures are not simply failures of will. They are failures of perception. They arise from an ontology that imagines selves as sealed units and treats relation as optional. When the world is apprehended as external and inert, care becomes intervention. Responsibility becomes management while action outruns attention.

This helps explain my growing unease with the language of solutions in ecological discourse. Solutions presume problems that can be isolated and systems that can be controlled from above. They rely, often implicitly, on a model of consciousness that stands outside what it seeks to fix. But ecological crises are not engineering glitches. They are symptoms of fractured relation… between humans and land, between perception and participation, and between ourselves and the cosmos.

A bubble ontology does not promise mastery. It cannot guarantee outcomes. What it offers instead is a more faithful description of how beings actually persist: through tension, vulnerability, and responsiveness. It suggests that ethical action must emerge from attunement rather than command. That care begins with learning how to remain present to what exceeds us.

Ecological encounters often happen at boundaries, such as fog lifting from a field, frost tracing the edge of a leaf, or wind moving through branches. These are not moments of clarity so much as moments of thickness, where distinctions remain but do not harden. They feel, in a small way, plasma-like. Charged, relational, and alive with forces that do not resolve into objects.

Perhaps consciousness belongs to this same family of phenomena. Not a substance to be located, but a pattern sustained by relation. Not a sovereign interior, but a delicate, responsive membrane. If so, empathy is not an add-on to an otherwise isolated self. It is a clue…a trace of the deeper structure of being.

What if consciousness is less a sealed interior and more a field held together by tensions we did not choose? What if its openness is not a vulnerability to be managed, but the very condition that makes response possible at all?

I don’t offer this as a solution. Only as an orientation or a way of learning to stay with the world without pretending it is simpler, or more controllable, than it is. Sometimes, the most faithful response begins by noticing the shape of what is already here.

Doomsday Clock Eighty-Five Seconds to Midnight: An Invitation to Attention

The news that the Doomsday Clock now stands at eighty-five seconds to midnight is not, in itself, the most important thing about this moment. The number is arresting, and the coverage tends to amplify its urgency. But the deeper question raised by this year’s announcement is not how close we are to catastrophe. It is how we are learning, or failing, to attend to the conditions that make catastrophe thinkable in the first place.

What the Clock reflects is not a single looming disaster but a convergence of unresolved tensions from nuclear instability, ecological breakdown, accelerating technologies, and political fragmentation (not to mention our spiritual crisis and the very real scenes we’re seeing with our own eyes in each of our communities with federal authorities and directed violence here in the United States).

These are not isolated threats. They form a dense field of entanglement, reinforcing one another across systems we have built but no longer fully understand or govern. The Clock does not merely measure danger. It reveals a world stretched thin by its own speed.

One risk of symbolic warnings like this is that they can tempt us into abstraction. “Eighty-five seconds to midnight” can feel cinematic, even mythic, while the realities beneath it, such as warming soils, poisoned waters, eroded trust, and automated corporatist decision-making, remain oddly distant. When risk becomes spectacle, attention falters. And when attention falters, responsibility diffuses (part of the aim of keeping us distracted with screens and political theater).

This is where I think the Clock’s real work begins. It presses on a crisis not only of policy or technology, but of perception. We have grown adept at responding to emergencies that suddenly emerge, and far less capable of staying with harms that unfold slowly, relationally, and across generations. Climate disruption, ecological loss, and technological overreach do not arrive as single events. They address us quietly, repeatedly, asking whether we are willing to notice what is already being asked of us.

In earlier posts, I’ve suggested that empathy is not first an ethical achievement but a mode of perception, or a way “the world” comes to matter. Attention works in a similar register. It is not merely focus or vigilance. It is a practiced openness to being addressed by what exceeds us. The Doomsday Clock, at its best, functions as a crude but persistent call to such attention. It interrupts complacency not by predicting the future, but by unsettling how we inhabit the present.

And here is where something genuinely hopeful emerges.

The Clock is not fate. It has moved away from midnight before, not through technological miracles alone, but through shifts in collective orientation, such as restraint, cooperation, treaty-making, and shared commitments to limits. Those movements were not perfect or permanent, but they remind us that attention can be cultivated and that perception can change. Worlds do not only end. They also reorient.

Hope, in this sense, is not confidence that things will turn out fine. It is the thing with feathers and the willingness to stay present to what is fragile without turning away or grasping for false reassurance. It is the discipline of attending to land, to neighbors, to systems we participate in but rarely see or acknowledge. It is the slow work of empathy extended beyond the human, allowing rivers, forests, and even future generations to count as more than abstractions.

Eighty-five seconds to midnight is not a verdict. It is an invitation to recover forms of attention capable of holding complexity without paralysis. An invitation to let empathy deepen into responsibility. An invitation to notice that the most meaningful movements away from catastrophe begin not with panic, but with learning how to listen again to the world as it is, and to the world as it might yet become.

The question, then, is not whether the clock will strike midnight. The question is whether we will accept the invitation it places before us to attend, to respond, and to live as if what we are already being asked to notice truly matters.

Letting the World Appear

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to let the world appear.

Not to analyze it.

Not to manage it.

Not even to care for it (at least not yet).

Just to allow the world to show up as something other than an extension of myself.

So much of contemporary life trains us in a posture of extraction. We move through days asking what can be used, optimized, corrected, or explained. Even our best intentions, from ethical concern, activism, and compassion, often arrive after the world has already been reduced to an object of concern. We rush toward response without lingering long enough with perception.

But perception, I’m increasingly convinced, is not neutral. It is already a moral act.

To perceive carefully is to allow the possibility that what I encounter exceeds me… that it carries its own depth, rhythm, and interiority, even if I cannot name it. This is true when I’m listening to another person speak. It’s also true when I’m standing near a tree, watching weather move across a field, or reading a text written centuries ago by someone whose world I will never fully inhabit.

What we often call empathy begins here, not as feeling-with, but as restraint. A refusal to rush in. A willingness to let the other remain partially opaque.

This matters because many of our current crises (ecological, political, spiritual, especially) are not simply failures of care. They are failures of attention. We have learned how to act without learning how to see. The result is a world that feels thin, instrumental, and endlessly available for use.

But when the world is allowed to appear on its own terms, something shifts. Places become storied rather than scenic. Communities become thick with memory rather than data points. Nonhuman life stops being “environment” and starts registering as presence. This doesn’t give us an answer about what to do next. And maybe that’s the point.

Before ethics, there is perception.

Before action, there is address.

Before care, there is the quiet discipline of letting the world show up as more than ours.

Today, at least, that feels like enough.

I’m trying to practice this kind of attention in small, ordinary ways. This past year, that practice has taken the form of tracking a black walnut tree in my backyard… returning to it again and again, not to extract meaning, but to notice what shows itself over time. The notes from that ongoing practice are gathered at samharrelson.com/tracking. It’s a reminder, for me at least, that learning to let the world appear is not a theory so much as a habit… one that grows slowly, like the tree itself.

Getting Down to Earth

Good thoughts to ponder here…

Let’s Get Down to Earth Again | Reflections:

I find myself wondering what Earth would be like if long ago Christians had been content to live simply, care for others, and honor the Earth. By failing to nurture and honor the universal sense of the sacred within all of God’s people, creatures, and creation, the church has missed chances for transformational leadership in the climate crisis. My sense is that all of our institutions reflect the dominant culture of power, profit, and privilege. Even as the Earth is in peril, there is an absurd unwillingness to move beyond the status quo. Action must rise from the margins, as movements always do, to resist the prevailing cultural consumerism and discern a vision for a more resilient network of communities, a more just economy, and the health of the Earth.

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