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

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

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

“And Who Is My Neighbor?”

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

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

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

🔗 Event details

Paper title:

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

Abstract:

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

Return to the Roots: How We Move Forward

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

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

🔗 Event details and RSVP

Paper title:

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

Abstract:

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

Eternity in Time: Thinking with the Church through History

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

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

🔗 Conference information

Paper title:

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

Abstract:

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

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

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

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

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

Ecological Intentionality and the Depth of Being

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can read the full paper here:

Ecological Intentionality and Depth of Being Public Download

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listening and Intentionality

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

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

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

Listening Beyond the Human

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

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

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

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

Theological Stakes

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

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

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

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

Listening as Practice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why This Matters Now

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

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

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

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

Christian Wiman, Consciousness, and Learning How to Listen Again

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

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

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

Consciousness Beyond the Skull

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

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

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

Physics, Poetics, and the Shape of Attention

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

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

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

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

God Without Final Answers

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

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

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

Ecology as a Practice of Listening

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

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

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

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

Listening as Theological Method

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

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

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

Quantum–Plasma Consciousness and the Ecology of the Cross

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

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

Abstract

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

PDF download below…

Quantum–Plasma Consciousness and the Ecology of the Cross Download

Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being

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

Plasma, Consciousness, and the Phenomenological Cosmos: Relational Fields

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

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

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

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

Plasma Consciousness: Thinking With the Luminous Universe

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

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

An Ecology of the Cross Audio Reflection

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

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

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

Abstract

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

Recovering Entranced and Enchanted Christianity

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

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

A Secret History of Christianity – Mark Vernon:

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

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

Black Walnut Tree Reading

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

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

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

Yale Div’s Living Village

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

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

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

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

Pope Leo’s Ice Blessing

We need to hear this in our Protestant churches in the United States every Sunday (and Wednesday and Sunday night and Tuesday during gatherings, etc.). Glad to see Leo taking on the ecological mantle from Francis.

Emphasis mine in the quote here…

Pope Leo XIV blesses glacier ice urging global leaders to act on climate change – India Today:

Citing Francis’s text, Leo recalled that some leaders had chosen to “deride the evident signs of climate change, to ridicule those who speak of global warming and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them most.”

He called for a change of heart to truly embrace the environmental cause and said any Christian should be onboard.

“We cannot love God, whom we cannot see, while despising his creatures. Nor can we call ourselves disciples of Jesus Christ without participating in his outlook on creation and his care for all that is fragile and wounded,” he said, presiding on a stage that featured a large chunk of a melting glacier from Greenland and tropical ferns.

The New Ecozoic Reader

Prof. Sam Mickey discusses the volume he edited titled The New Ecozoic Reader this week. If you’re anywhere interested or adjacent to the study of Religion and Ecology, I highly suggest listening to the podcast episode here as well as reading at least the Introduction here to The New Ecozoic Reader (available for free download or you can order a print copy as well)!

Lisa Dahill’s chapter on rewilding Christianity was particulary fascinating to me.

Season Five | Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology:

In this episode of Spotlights, our host discusses a very special issue of The New Ecozoic Reader that has just been released. This special issue, edited by the Forum’s own Sam Mickey and Sam C. King offers retrospective and prospective views on the field of religion and ecology: looking at where we’ve been, where things stand now, and how the field, and our work together, could evolve going forward. The issue is very intergenerational and includes essays by both esteemed and established figures in the field, and younger scholars, just emerging on the scene. The issue includes a foreword by Iyad Abumoghli of UNEP Faith for Earth Coalition, a preface by Sam King and Sam Mickey, an Introduction by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, and contributions from: Heather Eaton, David Haberman, Elizabeth Allison, Whitney A. Bauman, Ibrahim Ozdemir, Jason Brown, Kim Carfore, Sarah Pike, Lisa E. Dahill, Nancy Wright, Jim Robinson, Melanie L. Harris, Christopher Key Chapple, Dan Smyer Yu, Charisma K. Lepcha, Philip P. Arnold, Sandra L. Bigtree, Graham Harvey, Russell C. Powell, Rachael Petersen, Terra Schwerin Rowe, and Larry Rasmussen.

Viriditas and the Ecology of the Cross: Hildegard’s Greening Vision Meets a Kenotic Cosmos

Greening Ancient Wisdom for Today’s Crisis

On many mornings, I find myself sitting beneath the black walnut tree in my backyard, contemplating how an ancient abbess’s wisdom speaks to our ecological crisis. Hildegard of Bingen, 12th-century mystic, healer, and visionary, loved to talk about viriditas, the “greening” life-force of God in creation. She lived in a world where forests were alive with divine Light, and every medicinal herb carried a spark of God’s vitality. As a PhD student in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion, I’m continually amazed by how Hildegard’s medieval insights resonate with what I call the Ecology of the Cross, or a theological framework that challenges our modern extractive paradigms with a vision of kenosis, interdependence, and sacred entanglement. In this post, I want to weave together Hildegard’s greening spirituality with the Ecology of the Cross, exploring how her ancient ontology can inform a Christian ecological lens today.

Hildegard’s Viriditas: Greening Power and Divine Immanence

Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was a Benedictine abbess who saw the natural world lit up from within by God’s presence. Surrounded by the lush Rhineland forests, she perceived God’s “living power of light” energizing all creation, a verdant force she famously named viriditas, or greenness or greening power. In Hildegard’s theology, viriditas is the Holy Spirit’s life flowing through plants, animals, and elements, infusing them with vitality and growth.

“The greening power of the earth is the viriditas, which is the living light of the Holy Spirit… It is the love of God that flows through all creation, bringing forth new life and growth,” Hildegard wrote.

This was no poetic flourish for her; it was a literal cosmological principle. In her mystical visions, the entire universe even appeared as a tree, “verdant with God’s wisdom” and pulsing with divine life. For Hildegard, God was not a distant clockmaker but immanent in nature – present in the sap of trees, the humors of the human body, the cycles of the cosmos. All creation, she believed, is “alive with God’s presence” and thus sings a song of praise back to its Creator.

Crucially, Hildegard’s spirituality was deeply non-dualistic. She did not split spirit from matter. One commentator notes that she held a “theandrocosmic” ecology of life – a holistic view of reality as a dialogue between God (theos), humanity (anthropos), and the cosmos. This means Hildegard saw everything as interconnected as the health of the soul, the health of the body, and the health of the Earth were all of a piece. Indeed, Hildegard was a renowned healer in her time as a botanist and physician who composed texts on herbal medicine and the human body. She left behind volumes of wisdom on topics ranging from healthcare and natural remedies to music, ethics, and theology.

Her medical work (such as Physica and Causae et Curae) catalogued plants, stones, and animals, not just for their physical properties but for their spiritual virtues. In Hildegard’s eyes, studying nature was a way to understand God’s ongoing creative work. Healing a body with herbs and prayer was part of healing the ruptured relationship between humanity and creation. Divine immanence for Hildegard meant that the Creator’s power “flows through all creation,” so caring for creation was nothing less than an act of love for God. She warned that when we harm the earth, we harm ourselves, because we are inextricably part of this sacred web: “When we destroy the earth, we destroy ourselves,” she wrote bluntly. It’s hard to imagine a more ontologically rich affirmation of interdependence from the Middle Ages.

The Cross as Tree of Life: A Paradigm of Kenosis

Centuries before terms like “ecotheology” existed, Hildegard and her fellow medieval mystics were already linking the Cross with creation. In Christian symbolism, the cross of Christ has long been understood as a kind of Tree of Life. The New Testament itself refers to the cross as a “tree” (xylon in Greek which also refers to “clubs” throughout the Gospels interestingly enough) on which Christ was crucified (Acts 5:30; 1 Pet. 2:24). Early Christians couldn’t miss the irony of a wooden instrument of execution becoming the cosmic tree of redemption. Hildegard expands this imagery with her vision of the verdant universe. We might say her viriditas concept lets us imagine the cross not as dead wood, but as a tree greening with new life by God’s power. In one of my favorite poetic images, “even the cross, that ruined tree, bears sap enough to green the nations”… in other words, through the cross’s wood flows the viriditas of God, bringing renewal out of death.

This brings us to what I call the Ecology of the Cross. At its heart, this framework re-imagines the cross as more than a ticket to individual salvation; it is a paradigm of kenosis, interconnection, and humble participation in the wider community of creation. The Greek word kenosis refers to Christ’s “self-emptying” love (Phil. 2:5–8). On the cross, according to Christian faith, God-in-Christ empties Himself by pouring out divine love in utter vulnerability, even to the point of death. Traditionally, Christians see this as the path to resurrection and new life. But what if we also view it through an ecological lens? Ecology of the Cross suggests that the cross is “an ecological gesture of descent: a humble participation in the mutual vulnerability of the world”. In Jesus’ self-emptying sacrifice we see a model for how we humans should relate to the more-than-human world with radical humility instead of domination, willing to relinquish our privilege and power for the sake of healing relationships.

Such a kenotic ecology directly critiques modern extractive paradigms. Our industrial-technocratic society has often approached nature with an attitude of grasping and exploitation, the very opposite of self-emptying. Forests are logged and burned for profit, rivers are dammed and polluted for convenience, animals are driven to extinction for consumption or farmed for extracting nutrients in non-sustainable and ethically horrible ways. Creation bears the wounds of these extractive systems. In fact, we can literally see it in the trees: “forests today stand as cruciform realities: logged, burned, cut down, yet also central to the healing of the planet”. The cross, in an ecological sense, is present wherever life is suffering under unjust exploitation and wherever sacrificial love is bringing forth healing. The Ecology of the Cross invites us to recognize that the pattern of Christ’s cross, death and resurrection, is woven into Earth’s own rhythms. As I’ve written elsewhere, “the cross is ecological: a revelation of life’s pattern as death-and-renewal, as sacrifice-and-gift”. Every fallen forest that sprouts green shoots from its stump, every species brought back from the brink by compassionate conservation, every community that sacrifices for environmental justice… these are cruciform moments, little enactments of resurrection life.

Sacred Entanglement: Communion Beyond the Human

One of Hildegard’s gifts to us is a vision of sacred entanglement in a cosmos where everything is enfolded in everything else through God’s love. She spoke of the elemental interconnectedness of the four elements, the celestial bodies, and the human being (microcosm mirroring macrocosm). Modern science, with its talk of ecosystems and quantum entanglement, is catching up to this ancient intuition that “all beings are entangled in webs of relation”. Hildegard would agree wholeheartedly. And Christian theology adds: all those relations are grounded in God. Nothing exists outside the divine dance of communion. Significantly, Hildegard’s cosmology didn’t isolate humanity from nature; instead, she saw humans as integrated participants in the community of creation, “a world – everything is hidden in you,” she imagines God saying to each person, for the whole cosmos lives inside of us as we live inside it. This has profound ethical implications… if we and the earth are truly part of one living network sustained by God’s viriditas, then our calling is to nurture that network, to tend and befriend it, not to dominate or ignore it.

The Ecology of the Cross builds on this kind of sacred interconnectedness. It emphasizes that redemption is not apart from creation, but through it – through roots and branches, through crucifixion and renewal. In Jesus’ crucifixion, God doesn’t pluck souls out of creation; God enters into creation’s deepest pains to transform them from within. The Cross is God with us, with all of us, including the sparrows, the soil, and the stars. This is a profoundly metaphysical statement as it suggests that at the heart of reality (the metaphysical core of existence) there is a cruciform love that ties all things together in a bond of shared being. As theologian Catherine Keller might put it, there is an apophatic entanglement at work – a holy interweaving we only dimly perceive but are nevertheless a part of. Or as philosopher William Desmond would say, standing before a living tree draws us into “the between,” that threshold where mystery breathes through being. Such moments can feel sacramental. Indeed, in a sacramental worldview the material world mediates God’s presence. A forest can be a temple, a river can whisper divine truth. Hildegard, composing her ethereal chants to the viriditas of the Spirit, understood this well. The whole world was her monastery’s cloister garden, alive with God.

For those of us drawn to Christian ecotheology, to speak of sacred entanglement is to affirm what the Gospel has hinted all along: that Christ’s reconciliation “extends to all things” (Col. 1:20) and that creation itself eagerly awaits liberation (Rom. 8:19-21). We find ourselves, then, in a spiritual lineage that runs from saints like Hildegard straight to the present. “From the prophets to Jesus’ parables to Hildegard of Bingen’s viriditas… our tradition is rich with ecological wisdom,” as I’ve noted before on Thinking Religion. The task now is to live into that wisdom.

Kenosis, Viriditas, and Living in Communion

Bringing Hildegard’s mysticism into conversation with the Ecology of the Cross enriches both. Hildegard gives us the vibrant language of greening and the assurance that caring for the earth is an act of love for God. The Ecology of the Cross, for its part, gives us the challenging ethic of kenosis and the call to empty ourselves of pride, greed, and the will-to-dominate so that we can truly serve and commune with our neighbors, human and non-human. Together, these threads form a kind of cruciform ecology of grace as an approach to the environmental crisis that is both deeply spiritual and vigorously practical. It asks us to reimagine what sacrifice means. Instead of the destructive sacrifices demanded by extractive capitalism (where we sacrifice forests and futures on the altar of consumerism or chauvanism), we are invited into the life-giving sacrifice modeled by Christ and celebrated by Hildegard and a sacrifice that gives up self for the sake of renewed life for others. This could look like deliberate simplicity and restraint (a kenotic lifestyle that “lets go” of excess consumption), or like actively bearing the cross of ecological work in its many forms, whether that is replanting a clear-cut area, advocating for environmental justice in our communities, or tending a backyard garden as if it were an altar.

My own theological perspective is rooted in this integration of ancient wisdom and new vision. I’m convinced, as are many others, that our spiritual narratives and our ecological actions are inseparable. When Hildegard urges us to “participate in the love of God” by caring for creation, she is echoing the kenotic love poured out on the cross – a love that holds nothing back, not even life itself, for the sake of beloved creation. This perspective reframes Christian mission: it’s no longer only about saving souls, but about healing relationships across the web of life. It also reframes metaphysical and ontological questions. We begin to ask: What is the nature of being, if not being-with? What kind of world is this, if the Creator chose to wear its flesh and suffer its pains? Such questions lead us into what theologian Thomas Berry called The Great Work of our times and to rediscover ourselves as part of a sacred Earth community and to act accordingly.

In the end, Hildegard’s viriditas and the Ecology of the Cross converge on a message of hopeful, humble participation. Even in a time of climate upheaval, mass extinction, and social fragmentation, we’re invited to see the world with new eyes “to help people see differently and to recover the rooted wisdom of scripture and tradition,” as I often remind churches. We are invited to step into what the Benedictine tradition would call ora et labora, or prayer and work, on behalf of creation, joining our hands and hearts to the greening, healing work God is doing. The Tree of Life stands not as a mere symbol, but as an ongoing reality with the cross planted in the earth, drawing all things into divine communion. Hildegard’s lush visions and the Cross’s stark call both beckon us toward a future where humans live with reverence among our fellow creatures, where we embrace our creaturely limits and gift, and where, by God’s grace, the desert places of our world can bloom again.

As the farmer-poet Wendell Berry has said (in a line that often echoes in my mind when I gaze at a thriving green tree stump): “Practice resurrection.” A tree knows how. By the greening power of God and the self-emptying love of Christ, may we learn how as well.

Platonic Biology

Prof. Segall (one of my amazing Prof’s at CIIS) has a fantastic post here that I very much agree with…

(30) The Return of Platonic Biology – by Matthew David Segall:

Process philosophy offers an alternative proposal that avoids the extremes of both reductive materialism and transcendent idealism. Rather than treating forms as autonomous agents, it understands them as potentiae—non-historical possibilities with patterned relations among themselves and to actuality generally. These possibilities do not act. They ingress. Agency belongs to actual occasions of experience, the events of concrescence in which the physical inheritance of the past meets the lure of unrealized potential. Forms become effective only as they are selected and transformed within the creative advance of living occasions.

Resting Heart Rates

I made some changes in my life back in May as my semester ended in my PhD studies and my dissertation began to take shape ahead of my 47th birthday.

We did lots of traveling as a family in June and July, I signed some new consulting clients, built a few websites, and had a wonderful summer of adventure. Those changes I made stuck and became routines and rituals. I slept well even in crowded hotel rooms and AirBNB’s in new cities with our children. I noticed my resting heart rate had dropped pretty dramatically.

Then August arrived and brought with it the annual torrent of new teachers and routines and meetings and after school activities and pick ups and drop offs and all things associated with having three young children. I noticed my heart rate had increased again. Things done and things left undone as the Book of Common Prayer reminds us to consider.

Talking with the Black Walnut this week, I’ve been pondering our own human conceptions of time and rhythm as I watch its leaves begin to silently fall here in late September.

I like to tell people that my dissertation (Ecology of the Cross) is my life’s work and that’s what I’m working on… contributing to Thomas Berry’s incantation of The Great Work of our time. Phenomenology has provided the structure for most of my research and thoughts as a part of all that work. Deep down, I realize (thanks to the Black Walnut and resting heart rates) that my life’s work is… my five children.

Maybe that dissertation will play some part in that in the future as they continue to explore, learn, and perceive the phenomena of consciousness and being in new ways. Planting sequoias for them and others who might be interested in what I have to say based on my aging heart and aging skin’s experience.

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

I think of my aging heart and skin and my aging children and my aging theologies and philosophies. I turn back to Aristotle and Augustine and Hildegard and Edith Stein for answers while trying to look forward in a world of unease brought on by a spiritual crisis of being. And the Black Walnut reminds me in all of that consternation about time and aging that the cosmic dance goes on, ever turning and circling… not linear.

Not about monthly or quarterly trends or resting heart rates… but part of a much larger dance that we are somehow privileged to enjoy for a brief “time” as Humans. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. This insubstantial pageant of modernity goes on, and we’ll return to the dust from which we were lovingly made. But heart rates and life (as we consider we know it) itself is a part of the cycle that spins forever and concrescing in little moments of magic that become us.

So, don’t worry about your resting heart rate too much, Sam. The Circle won’t be unbroken:

I danced on a Friday
When the sky turned black
It’s hard to dance
With the devil on your back.
They buried my body
And they thought I’d gone,
But I am the Dance,
And I still go on.

Dance, then, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he

Tracking a Tree

Back in January, I started tracking a black walnut (juglans nigra) in our backyard as part of coursework in my PhD studies. It seems like an innocuous thing to “track” a “tree,” doesn’t it? Those are in the form of regular audio reflections and pictures I’ve collected here.

The above video is from a snippet of reflections that I put together using Google’s fascinating and important NotebookLM. If there ever was something beneficial that has come from our early explorations with AI, this is definitely one.

Turns out, the practice (ritual?) has been quite transformative for me as a human. Moving from the winter months of little growth and “change” perceptible to us to an onlsaught of green sprouts and leaves emerging day-by-day over the spring and summer to the development of seed pods to now observing the falling leaves (and seed pods) has been an experience outside of our own conceptions of time. From phenomenology to existentialism to Christian ecology, it’s been quite the journey so far.

I hope some of that transformation has in some way contributed to the story of the black walnut that I’ve shared so many insights, tears, prayers, and reflections with over the course of the year.

You can see the images and hear the full audio recordings here at https://samharrelson.com/tracking.