Category: Presentations

What We Notice, What We Owe: A Black Walnut at UU Lake Norman

Yesterday afternoon I drove up to Davidson, North Carolina, to speak at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Lake Norman.

The meditation was called “What We Notice, What We Owe.”

The question I had sent ahead was fairly straightforward:

What might paying close attention to a tree teach us about how we live with one another and with the more-than-human world?

The answer has become considerably less straightforward.

For the past several months, I’ve been sitting most mornings with the black walnut tree behind our house in Spartanburg. The practice began as a way of putting some of my doctoral work under pressure outside the reading chair. If I’m going to write about ecological intentionality, creaturely encounter, empathy, perception, and the limits of what one living being can know of another, then I need some place where those ideas can encounter something other than another book.

The walnut has been very good at that.

Again and again, the practice has shown me how quickly attention becomes interpretation. A branch moves, and I call it reaching. A walnut falls, and I call it a gift. A fungal branch comes down in a storm, and within a few sentences I’ve written an entire metaphysics for the tree.

One of the phrases that has emerged from the field notes is:

Availability is not invitation.

Something being present to me, accessible to me, or even useful to me does not mean that it exists for me.

That distinction became the center of yesterday’s meditation.

I brought Edith Stein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty along, although lightly. Stein helps me think about the strange combination of presence and remainder in our encounter with another. Another being can really be given to me without being given as my own experience is. Merleau-Ponty helps unsettle the fantasy that I ever stand outside the world looking at it from nowhere. I am already embodied, situated, implicated, and seeing from somewhere.

But I’ve become increasingly convinced that the philosophical vocabulary works best in public when it follows the encounter rather than preceding it.

Begin with the walnut.

Then ask what has happened to our seeing.

That doesn’t prove ecological intentionality as a philosophical argument, and I don’t want to confuse a warm reception with philosophical warrant. But yesterday did show me something important about how this work can travel outside an academic setting.

People understood the problem because they already know what it is like to encounter something that exceeds their first description of it.

The Lake Norman setting gave us another way into that question.

We call it Lake Norman, but before it was Lake Norman it was the Catawba River. Cowans Ford Dam changed that landscape and created the reservoir in the twentieth century. Roads, home sites, crossings, histories, habitats, and older relationships with the land and water now sit beneath or around what appears at first glance to be simply “the lake.”

The congregation’s own land acknowledgment also names the much older presence of the Catawba and other Indigenous peoples in this region.

So the watershed itself became part of the argument.

A place can be many real things at once: drinking water, electricity, habitat, recreation, property, ancestral landscape, memory, river.

No single description exhausts it.

That is increasingly where my thinking about ecological intentionality is going. Better attention does not necessarily produce mastery. Sometimes better attention makes the inadequacy of mastery more obvious.

And then comes the harder question.

What does that ask of us?

Attention alone is not an ethic. Advertisers pay attention. Surveillance systems pay attention. Extraction industries can study forests, rivers, animals, and people with astonishing care.

The issue is what kind of attention we practice. Is it an attention that makes the world increasingly available to us? Or can attention also make us more available to correction, interruption, and change?

That question became the hinge of the meditation.

Afterward, the congregation has a practice they call “Talk Back,” and that may have been my favorite part of the afternoon. The sermon ended, but the conversation didn’t. We spent a good while talking about trees, forests, mycorrhizal networks, watersheds, attention, and what relationships among organisms might mean.

It was wonderfully nerdy. More importantly, it became communal.

Something that begins most mornings with one person sitting quietly beneath one walnut tree in Spartanburg had moved into a room full of people in Davidson, where they began adding their own trees, experiences, questions, and knowledge to it.

That meant a great deal to me.

I’ve been writing for some time that ecological intentionality should not become another way of making the more-than-human world say whatever we already wanted it to say. Yesterday reminded me of the other side of that claim. Restraint does not have to end in silence.

We can acknowledge that another life exceeds what we know of it and still remain in relationship.

We can act without pretending to possess complete knowledge. We can care while remaining corrigible. And perhaps attention becomes spiritual practice at exactly that point.

Earlier in this work I wrote a line that continues to follow me:

First, the seeing, then the keeping.

I’m less certain now about what either word means than I was when I first wrote it.

That seems like progress.

The recording of yesterday’s service is below, followed by the text of the meditation.

I’m deeply grateful to the folks at UU Lake Norman for the invitation, their hospitality, and especially the conversation afterward.

What We Notice, What We Owe

Thank you for having me here this afternoon.

I’ve been looking forward to being with you all, and I realized while looking through some of your recent services that I seem to have arrived in the middle of a conversation.

A couple of weeks ago, you were thinking about circles of concern. Last week, you were thinking about focus and attention.

So apparently my assignment today is to come in and make things more complicated.

Which, as a PhD student, I feel uniquely qualified to do.

But I do want to stay with that question of attention, because for the past several months I’ve been engaged in a practice that has become much more important to me than I expected.

There is a black walnut tree behind our house in Spartanburg.

And most mornings, I go outside and sit with it.

That’s about it.

I take a chair. I sit for twenty or thirty minutes. I usually take a photograph. I notice what’s happening. Then I record some reflections afterward.

I began doing this partly because of my doctoral research. I study ecology, spirituality, religion, and phenomenology, which is a philosophical tradition concerned, among other things, with how things actually appear to us in experience.

I’ve been developing an idea I call “ecological intentionality,” and sitting with one particular tree seemed like a reasonable way of testing some of the things I was thinking about.

And the strange thing is that the longer I’ve done it, the less certain I’ve become.

I mean that in a good way.

At first, it’s easy to sit beneath a tree and start interpreting.

This branch reaches toward the light.

This walnut has fallen to the ground.

This limb resisted the storm.

The tree is giving.

The tree is communicating.

The tree is teaching me.

Maybe some of those ways of speaking have value. But after sitting there day after day, I began to notice how quickly I moved from what I was actually seeing to what I wanted the tree to mean.

I could see a branch moving in the wind. I could not necessarily say that the tree was “reaching.”

I could see walnuts on the ground. I could not say that the tree had “given” them to me.

One morning I noticed fungal bodies growing from a branch that was still attached to the tree. Several days later, after storms had come through, that same branch was lying on the ground.

Those things I could say.

But the temptation was immediately to tell a story about them. The tree rejected the branch. The fungus killed it. The storm liberated it. The branch had somehow become available for me to take.

And suddenly my twenty minutes of careful observation had become a very elaborate autobiography.

The tree had developed exactly the philosophy that Sam needed it to have that morning.

That should probably make us suspicious.

So one of the sentences I’ve written in my field notes lately is this:

“Availability is not invitation.”

Just because something is available to me does not mean it exists for me.

And that has become one of the most important lessons of this practice.

The closer I look, the more present the tree becomes. But in some ways, the more mysterious it becomes too.

I know more, and I become more aware of what I don’t know.

That tension is at the heart of what I’ve been working on.

One of the philosophers important to my research is Edith Stein. She spent a great deal of time thinking about empathy and about what it means to encounter another being.

Her basic insight, put much more plainly than she puts it, is that another person really is present to me, but the other person’s experience is never given to me in exactly the same way that my own experience is.

I can encounter you. I can know you. I can love you. But I can never fully possess your experience from the inside.

Another philosopher important to me, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, reminds us that we never stand outside the world looking down upon it from nowhere.

We are bodies. We see from somewhere. We carry histories, habits, assumptions, abilities, wounds, hopes, and expectations into everything we encounter.

There is no view from above where I finally see everything exactly as it is.

And I find that both humbling and liberating.

Because it means the goal of attention is not mastery.

The goal might be to learn how to remain in relationship with something that exceeds my understanding.

And that brings me to the title of this talk.

“What We Notice, What We Owe.”

Because attention by itself doesn’t make us ethical.

People can pay extraordinary attention in order to exploit something. Advertisers pay attention. Surveillance systems pay attention. Industries can study forests, rivers, animals, and human communities with incredible care in order to extract more efficiently from them.

So “pay attention” isn’t enough.

The real question is:

What kind of attention are we practicing?

Is it an attention that merely makes the world more available to us, or one that leaves us open to being interrupted, corrected, and changed by what we encounter?

That, I think, is where attention begins to become an ethical and even a spiritual practice.

And here in Lake Norman, you have an extraordinary example of how complicated this can become.

We call this place Lake Norman.

And of course it is a lake.

But before it was Lake Norman, it was the Catawba River.

Beginning in 1959, Cowans Ford Dam was built across the Catawba. Water rose behind it, eventually covering more than 32,000 acres.

Roads disappeared beneath the water.

Home sites disappeared.

Old crossings disappeared.

A river became a reservoir.

And today that water is many things at once: electricity, drinking water, habitat, recreation, waterfront property, economic development, memory.

And it is still water moving through the Catawba watershed.

None of those descriptions is necessarily false.

But none of them exhausts the place.

I also noticed that your own materials acknowledge that this region carries histories far older than the name Lake Norman, including the histories of the Catawba and other Indigenous peoples who have lived in relationship with these lands and waters.

An acknowledgment like that matters when it complicates our seeing.

It reminds us that the landscape in front of us is never only the landscape we happen to see today.

Places carry histories. Watersheds carry histories. Communities carry histories.

Attention can teach us to notice what our first glance leaves in the background.

This is one reason I appreciate the Unitarian Universalist language of an interdependent world.

But interdependence doesn’t mean harmony.

Trees compete for light. Animals eat other animals. Storms break branches. Human goods conflict with one another and with the goods of other creatures.

The same lake can be drinking water, habitat, recreation, power generation, ancestral landscape, and valuable real estate.

Those goods do not always line up neatly.

So recognizing interdependence doesn’t solve our ethical problems.

Sometimes it reveals how difficult they actually are.

One shared world does not mean one obvious good.

And that means attention must eventually become responsibility.

Not because careful observation magically tells us what to do, but because once we begin to see relationships that we had ignored, we can no longer pretend they aren’t there.

That’s true ecologically.

And I think it’s true of our human relationships too.

There are people whom our society has learned not to notice, histories we have been trained not to see, and neighbors we turn into categories long before we encounter them as people.

Attention cannot solve all of that.

But perhaps it can interrupt one of the habits that makes injustice possible: the belief that what we have noticed about another person is all there is to know.

The philosopher in me wants to say that no other being is exhausted by my perception of them.

The minister in me wants to say that this sounds a lot like humility.

And the person sitting under a walnut tree every morning is learning that humility does not mean doing nothing.

That matters because we can turn uncertainty into an excuse.

“I don’t fully understand this ecosystem, so I can’t act.”

“I don’t fully understand another person’s experience, so I have no responsibility.”

But we never get complete knowledge.

We act anyway.

The question is whether our action remains open to correction.

Can we care without pretending to possess? Can we make commitments while remaining willing to be changed by what we encounter next?

My own Christian tradition has something to contribute here.

One of the things Jesus says is, “Consider the lilies.”

And I love that word: consider.

Look.

Attend.

Before the explanation, before the doctrine, before the conclusion, there is an invitation to notice something alive that was already there.

My tradition hasn’t always been especially good at that.

Christians have sometimes been much better at explaining what creation means than at paying attention to what creation is doing.

We’ve been good at turning the world into symbol.

Less good, sometimes, at allowing the world to remain a world.

And perhaps that’s why this little practice with the walnut has mattered so much to me.

It keeps putting me back in my chair.

Back in this body.

Back in this particular place.

Back before the temptation to make the world mean what I need it to mean.

In an earlier piece of my research, I wrote a phrase that has stayed with me:

First, the seeing, then the keeping.

I’m less certain now about what “seeing” means than I was when I wrote it.

And I’m probably less certain about “keeping” too.

But I still think the order matters.

First, learn to attend.

Then ask what care requires.

Maybe keeping doesn’t mean possessing.

Maybe keeping means tending, protecting, remaining faithful to a relationship.

Learning enough about a place that its destruction can no longer be abstract.

Learning enough about another person that their suffering cannot remain a category.

Learning enough about the tree outside your window that it ceases to be scenery.

And perhaps that is where what we notice begins to shape what we owe.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll probably sit beneath that walnut tree again.

I don’t expect it to tell me what to do.

I’ll sit.

I’ll look.

I’ll listen.

I’ll probably misunderstand something.

Hopefully I’ll notice enough to correct some of the misunderstanding.

And then I’ll try to carry that practice into the rest of the day.

Because the tree is not asking me to become a tree.

The Catawba is not asking us to become water.

Our neighbors are not asking us to fully possess their experience before we care for them.

Maybe what is being asked of us is harder and more ordinary than that:

To be present.

To pay attention.

To remain teachable.

And then, with all the incomplete knowledge we have, to act with care.

First, the seeing.

Then, the keeping.

What we notice.

And what we owe.

Thank you.

After the Talk

The formal meditation ended there, but the conversation afterward is part of what I want to remember.

I had asked two questions for the congregation’s Talk Back:

What is something you’ve learned to notice differently because you stayed with it long enough?

And has that change in attention ever changed what you felt responsible for?

From there we wandered, happily, into trees and fungal networks and watersheds and the complicated ways living systems are connected.

That seems appropriate.

The project began, after all, with a very small act.

Go outside.

Sit down.

Stay long enough to notice that the tree is not what you first thought it was.

Then stay a little longer.

I’m increasingly convinced that there’s a great deal of philosophical, ecological, and spiritual work contained in that practice.

And tomorrow morning, I’ll go sit beneath the walnut again.

Home Ground: Two Sundays at the UU Church of Spartanburg

At the Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg, what I would ordinarily call a sermon is called a meditation. That turned out to be the right word for what I was invited to offer there over two Sundays this August.

Their Minister, the incredible Scott Neely, asked me to think with the congregation about home. I had been writing for much of the summer about watersheds, attention, Edith Stein, and the moral life of a place, so I began with the most ordinary piece of ground I know: the slope behind our house in Spartanburg, where rain leaves the roof, crosses the yard beneath a black walnut, and begins its long movement toward Fairforest Creek, the Pacolet, the Broad, the Congaree, the Santee, and finally the Atlantic.

The two meditations became a small series called Home Ground: Watershed, Attention, and the Life We Hold in Common. The first asked where the water goes. The second asked what we demand of it while it is here. Between those questions is much of what I have been trying to understand in my academic work and my writing at Carolina Ecology: how attention reveals a world already shared, how empathy corrects the assumption that my own position is the center of that world, and how those discoveries become obligations within the places where we actually live.

The First Home Is a Watershed

The first meditation began with a roof and a claim that has stayed with me: every house in this county sits on a slope, and the slope decides where the water goes.

That sentence sounds like hydrology because it is simple hydrology (which I loved teaching in my years as a Middle School Science teacher!). It also unsettles many of our usual ways of describing home. A deed tells me where my property ends. Water crosses that line without consulting it. A street address places our house within a human system of roads and mail routes. The watershed gives us another address entirely. It tells us that we are downstream of someone and upstream of someone else, receiving what has already passed through another place and sending something onward in turn.

This is where Edith Stein’s account of empathy entered the meditation. Stein describes the lived body as the zero point of orientation, the here around which every there arranges itself. Encounter with another person reveals another center, another here from which I appear as a there. The encounter does not erase the difference between us. It discloses a common world that neither of us invented and neither of us owns.

I have come to think that a watershed can teach something similar. The water won’t let my yard remain the center. It leaves. It carries the material history of one place into another. It gives the abstract claim that we are related a direction, a gradient, and sometimes a muddy pair of shoes.

The meditation also returned to the black walnut in our backyard, where I sit most mornings before the children wake and the day becomes noisy. After enough mornings, a tree ceases to be scenery. It becomes a tutor in the discipline of attention. That tree has been holding a corner of our slope together, shading our children, feeding squirrels, and keeping the red clay from leaving for the creek. The ground has been keeping us all along.

The full service is below. The video begins at the start of the meditation, though the music, readings, and life of the congregation are worth hearing too.

The meditation begins at 25:24.

The complete text is available at Carolina Ecology: The First Home Is a Watershed.

What We Ask of the Water

The first Sunday moved from hydrology toward relation. The second had to ask what relation costs.

That week the question became unavoidably local. On South Pine Street, at the former Kohler factory site, a large data center project was moving forward. At a county fact-finding meeting, Spartanburg Water estimated that the facility would use roughly 459,000 gallons of water each day, an amount comparable to the use of more than two thousand single-family homes. County Council had also delayed the final reading of a proposed data center moratorium until September.

Those facts placed an old prophetic text inside the county calendar. Amos speaks to a society that is prosperous, religious, and convinced of its own order. He calls for justice to roll down like water and righteousness like an enduring stream. The Hebrew image is stronger and stranger than the familiar English rendering sometimes allows. Amos imagines a seasonal watercourse that keeps running, a torrent that cannot be waited out or crossed on foot.

The important question was larger than whether the water system has the technical capacity to serve one more customer. Engineers can answer that question, and their answer matters. Another question stands behind it: Who belongs to the “we” making the request? Who is present when the cost is assessed? How far downstream does the moral community extend?

Here, Stein’s account of empathy became political. A public hearing, at its best, is a civic practice for shifting the zero point. It brings other centers of experience into the room and reveals that the official account of a place is partial. A person who wakes to the sound of construction at three in the morning knows something a permit does not contain. A longtime water customer knows something that cannot be reduced to projected capacity. Lawson’s Fork, the Pacolet, and the Broad hold claims that our procedures still have difficulty hearing.

I also wanted to say plainly that I am implicated in the demand. I use the cloud every day. My doctoral work, this website, Carolina Ecology, and the sermon itself depend upon machines housed in buildings like the one being built on South Pine Street. Innocence would be a false position from which to speak. The more useful work is to ask whether the arrangements among us are right, whether the public has genuinely been allowed to appear, and whether the water will leave the encounter diminished.

The full service is below. Once again, the recording begins at the meditation, and once again I recommend the whole service. TJ Turner’s music, including Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology),” made its own argument more eloquently than I could.

The meditation begins at 33:40.

The complete text is available at Carolina Ecology: What We Ask of the Water.

A Common World

I am deeply grateful to Scott and Anne, Erin and Kimberly, TJ and Clemson, Janice, and the staff and tech team at UUCS for their hospitality and trust. I am especially grateful to the congregation. The conversations after both services continued the meditations in ways I could never have written beforehand. Several people gave me new questions about the proposed ordinance, the history of this county, and the responsibilities carried by people who depend upon the same systems they are trying to examine.

That experience clarified something about the relationship between my academic work and public theology. I have been using the phrase ecological intentionality to describe a form of attention adequate to a world of living relations. In a seminar paper, that can remain a conceptual problem. In a sanctuary, with a bowl of water rippling near the chalice and a county decision approaching on the calendar, the idea has to touch the ground.

These two Sundays helped me see the movement more clearly. Attention teaches us where we are. Empathy reveals that our view from here is one view among others. A watershed gives that common world a material form. Public life asks whether we will organize our decisions as though any of this were true.

The map shows ownership. The slope shows relation. We need both kinds of knowledge. Only one of them tells us where the water is already going.

Reading Acts with Middle Schoolers: Waiting, Seeing, and Stepping Forward

This Sunday, I began leading a Sunday School class of middle schoolers on the New Testament book of Acts at First Presbyterian here in Spartanburg, and I find myself looking forward to it in ways that feel deeper than simply preparing a lesson series. Acts has long been one of those texts that quietly works on me over time, shaping how I understand faith, community, and change. Stepping into it with young people now feels especially fitting, not only because of where they are in life, but also because of the questions our broader current moment is placing before all of us.

Acts is not, at its core, a book about certainty. It is a book about beginnings. Its story opens in a space of waiting and confusion rather than clarity. The disciples and 120 or so members of the community that followed Jesus to his death and resurrection do not understand what is happening or what comes next. They ask Jesus if this is finally the moment when everything will be restored, when history will resolve into something stable and predictable. They are looking for a plan, for an answer that would make the future legible. Same as many of us do most days.

Instead, they are told to wait.

What comes is not a roadmap but courage. The Spirit does not arrive with instructions for building an institution or managing a movement. It changes how they see and how they attend. Wind, fire, speech, gathering… these are not merely supernatural signs but shifts in perception on Pentecost. The vicious violence that met the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry in the flesh has to still be raw for them as they gather and wait. But then the world that had seemed dangerous and closed off begins to appear open and alive with possibility. The people around them are no longer threats or strangers but interlocutors. The city of Jerusalem is no longer a place to hide from but a place to enter.

This is one of the ways Acts intersects so closely with the phenomenological work that shapes my doctoral studies at CIIS. Phenomenology, at its heart, is about attention. It asks how the world shows up for us and how our habits of seeing shape what becomes possible. My own work on ecological intentionality circles around the idea that participation in the world begins not with mastery but with perception. Before we act, we notice. Before we organize, we attend. The texture of reality shifts when our mode of attention shifts.

Acts is, among other things, a narrative of transformed attention. The disciples begin by asking questions framed by old expectations. They are still looking for restoration in familiar political or cultural terms. Pentecost does not hand them new information so much as it alters their field of awareness. Suddenly, they hear languages where before they heard noise. They see neighbors where before they saw differences, and they perceive opportunity where before they perceived danger.

This is why the movement in Acts unfolds the way it does, I think. It does not grow because its members possess certainty. It grows because their way of encountering the world has changed. They step forward not because they know exactly what will happen, but because they can notice new openings and respond to them. Faith here is less about holding the correct ideas or doctrinal points and more about cultivating a posture of attention that makes participation possible. It’s a reason that Acts is such an alluring text to many of us Baptists, in my opinion (with talk of “New Testament Church” and “house church” approaches being popular over the last few decades).

Middle schoolers are already negotiating this terrain. They are learning, often without naming it, that belonging depends on how we see one another and where we direct our attention. They know that a classroom can feel welcoming or hostile depending on subtle shifts in perception (both for teachers and students, as I learned in my two decades in Middle School classrooms!). They know that a friend group in the cafeteria can expand or contract based on who is noticed and who is ignored. In that sense, Acts meets them where they already live. It offers a story in which change begins not with certainty but with a reorientation of attention that makes new forms of community imaginable.

In an age marked by ecological strain, technological acceleration, and social fragmentation, political strife, and war… there is a strong pull toward waiting for perfect clarity before acting. Acts suggests another path. The story begins when people are willing to step into a world they do not fully understand, trusting that attention and courage will carry them further than certainty ever could.

Following Jesus did not make life predictable for what would become the earliest church. It made life larger, not by solving uncertainty but by opening their perception to a shared and unfolding world.

My hope in the weeks ahead is that these young people will glimpse that faith is not about resolving every question in advance. It is about learning to notice, to attend, and to take part in something that continues to unfold in our own communities today.

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!

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.

Relational Roots and Ecological Futures: Bridging Whitehead, Cobb, and Gullah Wisdom Toward a Decolonized Ecological Civilization

I spoke today at the Center for Process Studies’ conference, Is It Too Late?: Toward an Ecological Civilization on the topic of Gullah Geechee insights and practices that would urge the process philosophy of Whitehead or Cobb towards active participation and engagement in local communities. Here’s my paper and the presentation below…

Presentation on Gullah and Ecological CivilizationDownload

Center for Process Studies Presentation June 2025

I’m excited to present a paper this weekend at the Center for Process Studies’ conference (Pomona College, CA), “Is It Too Late?: Toward an Ecological Civilization.”

My paper is titled Relational Roots and Ecological Futures: Bridging Whitehead, Cobb, and Gullah Wisdom Toward a Decolonized Ecological Civilization and I’ll be posting that up after the conference this weekend!