Tag: conferences

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!

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

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

Abstract

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

Learning to Be Addressed by Trees publicDownload

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.

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!

The Power of Water in Religious Networks and Creation Panel

Here’s the video of a panel I was honored to moderate last week for California Institute of Integral Studies’ Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion’s “Religion and Ecology Summit.”

I thought the panel (as well as the other panels!) were fantastic and I’m still taking notes from the presentation for my own research.

Thanks to Prof. Elizabeth Allison and Charlie Forbes for all of their hard work and time on putting the Summit together.

“2025 Religion and Ecology Summit Hosted by the Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies April 21-23, 2025

The Power of Water in Religious Networks and Creation Panel Description: This panel brings together theologians, anthropologists, and scholars of religion to explore how water shapes sacred narratives, spiritual practices, and ecological wisdom across traditions. Together, these voices offer a powerful reflection on how water flows through religion, culture, and creation.

Reverend Dr. Brian Fiu Kolia Malua Theological College “The Power and Politics of Water: A Riverine Re-reading of Naaman’s Cleansing in 2 Kings 5”

Rabbi Dr. Ariel Mayse Stanford University “The Headwaters of Theology: Reflections on Water in Jewish Law and Thought”

Dr. Stephen Lansing Santa Fe Institute “A Letter to the Future from Bali’s Subaks”

Michelle Boyle California Institute of Integral Studies “Sacred Source: Culture and Spirit in the Valleys of the Po River Tributaries”

Dr. Willis Jenkins University of Virginia “Designing Research with Sacred Waters: Interdisciplinary Labs for Integrative Understandings”

Moderated by: Reverend Sam Harrelson California Institute of Integral Studies”

Long Strange Trip #asw12

Speaking of Affiliate Summit, found this trip down memory lane on Scribd (where the Affiliate Summit folks have uploaded a ton of material that you can fish through for hours):

Affiliate Summit 2003 Programhttp://www.scribd.com/embeds/27091560/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-9a7xf92he412mjpzcqx(function() { var scribd = document.createElement(“script”); scribd.type = “text/javascript”; scribd.async = true; scribd.src = “http://www.scribd.com/javascripts/embed_code/inject.js”; var s = document.getElementsByTagName(“script”)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(scribd, s); })();

I tried to get a seat to the first Affiliate Summit since I was in town for AdTech that year, but waited too long and missed out. It’s amazing that the conference is almost 10 years old.

Especially of note is the AdBumb article on page 3.

Dealing with eComXpo eMail

No matter how many times I've asked to be unsubscribed from eComXpo's mailing lists, I always get redundant mail from them anytime there's a new "virtual event" taking place.  It makes me wonder just how much money eComXpo has spent in acquiring email lists of affiliate marketers, publishers or bloggers over the years because the various email aliases that get sent their messages are all directly correlated to specific affiliate networks or newsletters.  Whatever… just don't sell/rent your email lists.  It's really a bad practice (and an ineffectual one in 2009). 

So, instead of relying on the good graces of the folks behind eComXpo to actually follow through with unsubscribe requests, I've had to invoke the nuclear option.

Thank goodness for GMail's filters:

It does not bode well for your business when you make folks take actions such as this for what should (legally) be your own responsibility. 

Lame.

Free Affiliate Summit Passes Today

FAE3B0A0-B0D4-44B3-AD51-BD23184B86A8.jpgI turn 30 just a few days after this year’s Affiliate Summit East. Helping me ring in my third decade is good enough reason to come to Boston, right? Well, even if you haven’t gotten a ticket yet, there’s a very good offer on the table for today.

For today only, Affiliate Summit is running a special promotion where anyone who hasn’t already registered for the Affiliate Summit East in Boston (August 10-12) can get a free exhibit hall pass…

Free Affiliate Summit Passes on June 11, 2008 | Affiliate Summit Blog: “We’ve got a special Affiliate Summit deal that’s only good for 24 hours – the day of June 11, 2008 EDT.

Everybody that is currently registered for Affiliate Summit 2008 East, taking place August 10-12 in Boston, is welcome to share the following coupon code with their friends and colleagues who are not yet registered:

ASE08JUNE11

This code is good for a free exhibit hall only pass (value $199).”

So, if you haven’t registered to come, you definitely should today. I can’t recommend the show enough (not just because I’m the “Minister of Social Media” this time) but because it really is the premier event for learning, networking and recruiting affiliates in the performance marketing space.

The speaker list is quite varied this year and the Affiliate Summit team has really mixed things up (in a good way) to keep the East show fresh.

Plus, you can buy me a drink for my 30th.

See you in Boston!

Affiliate Summit Network is a Success

This iteration of the Affiliate Summit Network is really taking off.

I think a good deal of its success so far has to do with it being hosted on Ning instead of Confabb as in years past. I love the integration of RSS, Twitter streams, Flickr, YouTube, etc that Ning provides and it makes the entire network feel much more robust and inviting than years past.

There are already over 70 pretty active members (growing daily) signed up and we’re discussing the NY state affiliate situation, how to market to marketers and all sorts of relevant topics that will surely be hot buttons at the conference in early August.

So, if you’re going to https://www.fusionquest.com/cgi-bin/main/hotlinks.cgi?aflt=afc1&client=affsumAffiliate Summit East (15% off if you use that link plus the code ase08afc15), make sure to join up on the network.

And if you do, make sure to add me as a friend.

Affiliate Summit Discount Flights

I’m a big fan of JetBlue, so this is a neat promotion for the next Affiliate Summit in Boston this August…

Special discount from jetBlue for Affiliate Summit | Affiliate Summit Blog: “Here are the details on how to book via the jetBlue promo page…

Code: ASE08
Discount: 5%
Valid Cities: Any City to BOS
Travel Dates: Outbound: 8/6-8/8 / Return: 8/12-8/14
Promo Valid: 5/2/08-8/7/08”

The discount is good for a few beverages and hot dogs at Fenway at the very least!