I’m Sam Harrelson, a scholar, writer, ordained minister, and consultant living in Spartanburg, South Carolina. I’m a PhD candidate in Philosophy and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where I study ecology, spirituality, and religion.
My work asks how another living being becomes perceptible as a life with its own form, directedness, and world, and what must change within us if we are to receive that life without reducing it to availability. I call the larger project The Ecology of the Cross. It grows from phenomenology and Christian theology, alongside red clay, falling walnuts, creeks, classrooms, archives, and family life in the Carolinas.
The Ecology of the Cross
Ecological intentionality names the encounter among a living organism, the milieu within which its life unfolds, and the embodied perceiver to whom some portion of that life becomes given. The encounter is real, though the creature always exceeds what the perceiver can know, name, or use.
The Ecology of the Cross asks what happens when careful perception reaches its limit and the appetite for mastery remains. Drawing especially from Edith Stein and John of the Cross, I understand the cross as a pattern of self-giving that transforms the perceiver and loosens the movement from attention into possession. It is a passage from mastery toward reception.
What must change within the perceiver so that another creature can appear as a life with its own form, its own directedness, and its own excess beyond our use?
Current Research
These three pieces offer the clearest path into the work as it stands now, from the framework developed in my first comprehensive examination to the questions carrying me toward the second.
Ecological Intentionality, Creaturely Form, and The Ecology of the Cross
My comprehensive examination paper develops ecological intentionality as an organism-milieu-perceiver relation grounded in creaturely form-in-act.
Intimacy with Remainder
Notes toward my second comprehensive examination, bringing Stein’s non-primordiality into conversation with Merleau-Ponty’s flesh and écart.
A Life in Act
An account of Edith Stein’s life and work, and of the education of attention that has placed her near the center of my own thinking.
View all papers, publications, and presentations →
Visit my Academia.edu research profile →
Writing from the Carolinas
Much of my thinking begins close to home in Spartanburg: in Piedmont clay, in the Lawson’s Fork watershed, beneath the black walnut behind our house, and among the histories carried through the Piedmont, Pee Dee, and Lowcountry. These places do more than illustrate the ideas. They question them, correct them, and give them somewhere to live.
At Carolina Ecology, I write more regularly about watersheds, trees, public life, environmental pressures, memory, and the ordinary work of learning to belong to a place.
Explore the Writing
Follow the Work
This site is a record of work still underway: academic research, theological reflection, public writing, and notes from a life lived among particular people and places. If something here connects with your own work, teaching, congregation, or community, I’d be glad to hear from you.