Tag: ecology of the cross

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.

What is Ecology?

My PhD work at CIIS is in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion (and my dissertation is on what I call the Ecology of the Cross… hence the subtitle of my site here).

Most people hear the word ecology and think of recycling bins, endangered species lists, or debates about climate policy. Ecology gets filed under “environmental issues,” which usually means something happening out there in forests, oceans, or polar ice.

But ecology did not begin as a political category, and it is not primarily about “nature” as something separate from us.

Ecology, at its root, is about home.

The word comes from the Greek oikos, meaning household, dwelling, or place of belonging, combined with logos, meaning study, account, or pattern of understanding. Ecology, then, is the study of the household… the attempt to understand how life lives together.

From the beginning, this includes humans. It always has.

The more scientific discipline of ecology emerged in the nineteenth century to describe relationships among organisms and their environments, but the deeper intuition is older and wider. It asks a simple but destabilizing question:

What does it mean to live within a shared world rather than on top of one?

When we reduce ecology to environmental management, we shrink this question into something technical. Forests become “resources.” Rivers become “water supply.” Soil becomes “land use.” Even conservation can slip into a language of control… how do we preserve, maintain, or optimize the system?

But ecology, in its fullest sense, is not about control. It is about relation.

An ecological perspective notices that nothing exists alone. A tree is not just a tree. It is soil, fungi, rainfall, insect traffic, bird migration, sunlight history, and deep time woven into a living form. A river is not just flowing water. It is geology, watershed, climate, agriculture, policy, memory (human and more-than-human), and story moving together across a landscape.

And a human being is not an isolated self, navigating a neutral backdrop. We are bodies shaped by air, food, language, microbes, culture, ancestry, and place. Even our thoughts emerge within networks of relation… familial, social, historical, material.

Ecology, then, is not merely a branch of biology. It is a way of perceiving reality (which is why I focus so much on empathy as an ontology, or way of thinking).

It invites us to see the world not as a collection of separate objects, but as a field of entanglements. Not as a machine assembled from parts, but as a living household whose members continually shape one another.

This shift is not only scientific. It is existential.

If ecology means household, then ecological crisis is not just environmental damage. It is disordered belonging. It signals that we have forgotten how to live within the home that sustains us.

This forgetting shows up in obvious ways… collapsing biodiversity, warming climates, polluted waters. But it also shows up in quieter, more intimate forms: chronic distraction, alienation from place, the sense that life is happening somewhere else while we scroll through representations of it.

In that sense, ecology is also about attention.

To live ecologically is to learn again how to notice where we are. It is to recognize that the ground beneath our feet is not generic “environment” but a specific, storied place. The Carolina Piedmont is not interchangeable with anywhere else. The black walnut in a backyard is not just another tree. It is a living participant in a shared field of existence… shaping shade, soil, insects, birds, and even the rhythms of a person who chooses to sit beside it each morning.

Ecology begins when we allow ourselves to be addressed by the world we inhabit.

This is why ecological thinking inevitably crosses into philosophy, theology, and even spirituality. Once we recognize that existence is relational all the way down, questions arise that science alone cannot settle. What kind of beings are we within this household? What responsibilities follow from belonging? What forms of knowledge emerge not from standing apart, but from participating?

Some traditions have long held that wisdom begins with remembering that the world is not raw material but shared dwelling. Modern ecology, at its best, does not invent this insight so much as rediscover it in empirical form.

Seen this way, ecology is not just about saving the planet. The planet will persist in some form regardless of us. Ecology is about learning how to live truthfully within the web of life that makes our own existence possible.

It is about recovering the sense that we are not spectators of the world, nor its managers, but members of its household.

And that realization, once it sinks in, changes everything… from how we farm and build to how we teach, pray, design cities, raise children, and even how we sit quietly beneath a tree and listen.

Ecology, in the end, is the study of how life belongs.

And perhaps, also, the practice of remembering that we belong here too.

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.

Creaturely Perception and the Greening of Being: Hildegard of Bingen, Edith Stein, and the Ecology of the Cross

Here’s another paper on the Ecology of the Cross that brings together Edith Stein with another one of my favorite thinkers, Hildegard of Bingen (along with John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, and writings from the Desert Mothers and Fathers), on the notion of perception that I’ve been writing about here in recent weeks.

I don’t like to rank my own work, but I do feel that this is one of my strongest pieces regarding this idea of empathy, listening, attention, and ultimately ontology.

Abstract:

This paper argues that the contemporary ecological crisis reflects not only ethical failure but a deeper disturbance in creaturely perception. Ecological devastation persists, I contend, because the world is no longer encountered as intrinsically meaningful, participatory, or given. Drawing on the theological cosmology of Hildegard of Bingen and the phenomenological metaphysics of Edith Stein, the paper develops an account of ecological intentionality as a mode of perception appropriate to finite, dependent creatures. Hildegard’s theology of viriditas articulates a participatory ontology in which creation exists through continuous reception of divine vitality, while Stein’s analysis of finite and eternal being clarifies the epistemological conditions of receptive knowing grounded in creaturely limitation rather than mastery.

Bringing these figures into dialogue with ascetic and mystical traditions, particularly the Desert Fathers and Mothers and the Carmelite theology of John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila, the paper argues that ecological perception requires cruciform formation. Exposure, deprivation, and unknowing function as schools of attention that retrain desire and resist technocratic habits of control. The paper concludes by proposing an Ecology of the Cross, in which vulnerability, dependence, and receptivity become the conditions for ecological faithfulness and renewed participation in a living creation.

Creaturely Perception and the Greening of Being publicDownload

Empathy Before Ethics (or Why We Should All Read More Edith Stein)

Empathy is one of those words that risks being worn thin by overuse and is too frequently misunderstood. It shows up everywhere now… in leadership manuals, in political rhetoric, in the well-meaning exhortations we give children and congregations. And yet, for all its familiarity, empathy remains deeply misunderstood. Too often it is reduced to a moral sentiment, a kind of emotional niceness, or worse, a strategy for persuasion. I want to suggest something quieter and more demanding… empathy as a way of perceiving.

“Empathy is the experience of foreign consciousness in general.”

Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (ICS Publications), p. 11

I have come to think of empathy not primarily as an ethical achievement but as an ontological posture. It is not something we do after we have already decided what matters. It is the manner in which the world first comes to matter at all.

This conviction has been sharpened for me through sustained engagement with Edith Stein, whose phenomenology of empathy remains one of the most careful and restrained accounts we have. For Stein, empathy is neither emotional contagion, weakness, nor imaginative projection. It is the act through which another subject’s experience is given to me as theirs, not mine. Empathy discloses interiority without collapsing difference. It is, from the start, a mode of knowing that preserves distance.

“The empathized experience is not given to me originally, but non-originally.”

Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, p. 7

In my own work, empathy names the fragile, attentive space where another presence addresses us before we categorize it, manage it, or explain it away. This is as true of human encounters as of encounters with trees, landscapes, animals, or histories. Empathy is the discipline of allowing oneself to be interrupted.

That interruption is rarely dramatic. Most often, it happens slowly, almost imperceptibly. A pause before speaking. A hesitation before naming. A sense that what is before me exceeds my grasp. In that pause, empathy is born… not as fusion or projection, but as restraint.

One of the mistakes modern culture makes is assuming that empathy means feeling what another feels. That framing subtly centers the self. It asks how the other’s experience can be translated into my own emotional register. Stein is especially helpful here. She insists that empathy is a non-original experience… I do not live the other’s joy or suffering as my own, but I genuinely encounter it as real. This distinction matters. It protects the other from appropriation and the self from illusion.

“The subject of the empathized experience is not identical with the subject who empathizes.”

Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, p. 10

This has profound implications for how we relate to the more-than-human world. When I sit with a tree… especially the black walnut that has quietly shaped my days over the past year… empathy does not mean imagining what it would be like to be a tree. That is a category error. Instead, empathy means allowing the tree to show up as something other than a resource, a metaphor, or a background object. It means attending to its rhythms, its vulnerabilities, its way of occupying time.

Here, Stein’s work opens a door rather than closing one. If empathy is the basic way another’s interiority becomes perceptible without being reduced, then the question is not whether nonhuman beings “have” interiority in a human sense. The question is whether we have trained ourselves to attend to modes of presence that do not mirror our own. Empathy, in this sense, is ecological. It resists extraction. It slows us down. It teaches us how to dwell rather than dominate.

“Empathy gives us experience of other persons and of their experiences, but it does not make them our own.”

Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, p. 12

I have found that empathy is also inseparable from humility. It requires accepting that understanding is always partial, always provisional. Stein never treats empathy as exhaustive knowledge. It is an opening, not a possession. This is uncomfortable in a culture that prizes mastery and certainty. Empathy refuses shortcuts. It cannot be automated or optimized. It unfolds through presence, patience, and a willingness to remain with what does not resolve.

This is why empathy cannot be commanded. It cannot be forced through moral exhortation alone. It must be cultivated through practices of attention… through walking familiar paths slowly, through listening without rehearsing replies, through learning the names and habits of the places we inhabit. Empathy grows where curiosity is protected.

And perhaps this is the most important thing I have learned. Empathy is not a soft virtue. It is a demanding discipline. It asks us to remain open in a world that rewards closure. It asks us to stay porous when efficiency would prefer boundaries sealed tight. It asks us to receive before we judge.

“It is only through empathy that we gain knowledge of the psychic life of others.”

Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, p. 14

If there is a future worth hoping for… ecologically, socially, spiritually… it will not be engineered solely through better systems or smarter technologies. It will be shaped by the recovery of this ancient, fragile capacity to be addressed by what is not ourselves.

Empathy does not solve the world’s problems. But without it, we cannot even perceive them rightly.

“Finite knowing is essentially fragmentary.”

Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, trans. Kurt Reinhardt (ICS Publications), p. 389

After the Crossroads: Artificial Intelligence, Place-Based Ethics, and the Slow Work of Moral Discernment

Over the past year, I’ve been tracking a question that began with a simple observation: Artificial intelligence isn’t only code or computation, but it’s infrastructure. It eats electricity and water. It sits on land. It reshapes local economies and local ecologies. It arrives through planning commissions and energy grids rather than through philosophical conference rooms.

That observation was the starting point of my November 2025 piece, “Artificial Intelligence at the Crossroads of Science, Ethics, and Spirituality.” In that first essay, I tried to draw out the scale of the stakes from the often-invisible material costs of AI, the ethical lacunae in policy debates, and the deep metaphysical questions we’re forced to confront when we start to think about artificial “intelligence” not as an abstraction but as an embodied presence in our world. If you haven’t read it yet, I would recommend it first as it provides the grounding that makes the new essay more than just a sequel.

Here’s the extended follow-up titled “After the Crossroads: Artificial Intelligence, Place-Based Ethics, and the Slow Work of Moral Discernment.” This piece expands the argument in several directions, and, I hope, deepens it.

If the first piece asked “What is AI doing here?”, this new essay asks “How do we respond, ethically and spiritually, when AI is no longer just a future possibility but a present reality?”

A few key parts:

1. From Abstraction to Emplacement

AI isn’t floating in the cloud, but it’s rooted in specific places with particular water tables, zoning laws, and bodies of people. Understanding AI ethically means understanding how it enters lived space, not just conceptual space.

2. Infrastructure as Moral Problem

The paper foregrounds the material aspects of AI, including data centers, energy grids, and water use, and treats these not as technical issues but as moral and ecological issues that call for ethical attention and political engagement.

3. A Theological Perspective on Governance

Drawing on ecological theology, liberation theology, and phenomenology, the essay reframes governance not as bureaucracy but as a moral practice. Decisions about land use, utilities, and community welfare become questions of justice, care, and collective responsibility.

4. Faith Communities as Ethical Agents

One of my central claims is that faith communities, including churches, are uniquely positioned to foster the moral formation necessary for ethical engagement with AI. These are communities in which practices of attention, patience, deliberation, and shared responsibility are cultivated through the ordinary rhythms of life (ideally).

This perspective is neither technophobic nor naïvely optimistic about innovation. It insists that ethical engagement with AI must be slow, embodied, and rooted in particular communities, not divorced into abstract principles.

Why This Matters Now

AI is no longer on the horizon. Its infrastructure is being built today, in places like ours (especially here in the Carolinas), with very material ecological footprints. These developments raise moral questions not only about algorithmic bias or job displacement, important as those topics are, but also about water tables, electrical grids, local economies, and democratic agency.

Those are questions not just for experts, but for communities, congregations, local governments, and engaged citizens.

This essay is written for anyone who wants to take those questions seriously without losing their grip on complexity, such as people of faith, people of conscience, and anyone concerned with how technology shapes places and lives.

I’m also planning shorter, reader-friendly versions of key sections, including one you can share with your congregation or community group.

We’re living in a time when theological attention and civic care overlap in real places, and it matters how we show up.

Abstract

This essay extends my earlier analysis of artificial intelligence (AI) as a convergence of science, ethics, and spirituality by deliberately turning toward questions of place, local governance, and moral formation. While much contemporary discourse on AI remains abstract or global in scale, the material realities of AI infrastructure increasingly manifest at the local level through data centers, energy demands, water use, zoning decisions, and environmental impacts. Drawing on ecological theology, phenomenology, and political theology, this essay argues that meaningful ethical engagement with AI requires slowing technological decision-making, recentering embodied and communal discernment, and reclaiming local democratic and spiritual practices as sites of moral agency. Rather than framing AI as either salvific or catastrophic, I propose understanding AI as a mirror that amplifies existing patterns of extraction, care, and neglect. The essay concludes by suggesting that faith communities and local institutions play a crucial, underexplored role in shaping AI’s trajectory through practices of attentiveness, accountability, and place-based moral reasoning.

After_the_Crossroads_AI_Place_Ethics_v2Download

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

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

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

“And Who Is My Neighbor?”

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

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

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

🔗 Event details

Paper title:

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

Abstract:

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

Return to the Roots: How We Move Forward

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

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

🔗 Event details and RSVP

Paper title:

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

Abstract:

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

Eternity in Time: Thinking with the Church through History

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

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

🔗 Conference information

Paper title:

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

Abstract:

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

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

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

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

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

Ecological Intentionality and the Depth of Being

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can read the full paper here:

Ecological Intentionality and Depth of Being PublicDownload

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listening and Intentionality

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

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

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

Listening Beyond the Human

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

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

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

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

Theological Stakes

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

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

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

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

Listening as Practice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why This Matters Now

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

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

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

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

Christian Wiman, Consciousness, and Learning How to Listen Again

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

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

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

Consciousness Beyond the Skull

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

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

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

Physics, Poetics, and the Shape of Attention

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

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

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

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

God Without Final Answers

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

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

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

Ecology as a Practice of Listening

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

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

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

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

Listening as Theological Method

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

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

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

How I Use Obsidian at CIIS: A Relational Workflow for Reading, Reflection, and Writing

Obsidian has become my living archive since I first dove in back in 2021 as a classroom teacher where I organized teaching notes, conversations, and todos as a Dean of Students… and now it has become the place where course readings, dissertation ideas, phenomenological field notes, theological insights, Canvas posts, and draft papers all meet in a shared relational space. It’s less a filing cabinet and more a garden. What I’m really doing in Obsidian is tending connections by letting ideas compost, cross-pollinate, and eventually grow into papers or long-form reflections. Here’s the core workflow I’m sharing with you.

Two places where I’d start before you dive in to Obsidian:

1. Book Notes as Living Conversations

When I read, whether it’s Merleau-Ponty, Edith Stein, Whitehead, or a text for PCC/ESR, I take notes into a Book Notes template that pulls in metadata automatically:

  • Author / Title / Year / Course
  • Core quotes (copied directly, tagged with #quote and citation)
  • My reflections in first person
  • Connections to other thinkers or my ongoing concepts: [[Ecological Intentionality]], [[Cruciform Consciousness]], [[Empathy (Stein)]], [[Flesh of the World]], etc.

Each book note ends with a section called “Where does this want to go?”

Sometimes the answer is a future paper, a blog post, or a concept node. That question keeps the note alive instead of archived.

2. Canvas Posts → Permanent Notes

I write most of my Canvas responses in Obsidian first. This lets me:

  1. Draft freely
  2. Link concepts as I’m thinking
  3. Keep a permanent, searchable archive of every class discussion

Each module prompt gets its own note in my Canvas/ folder. After posting, I create 1–3 “permanent notes” distilled from the response—short, atomic ideas written in my own voice.

For example, a Canvas post on the chiasm leads to permanent notes like:

  • Perception as reciprocal touch
  • The ecological thickness of the visible
  • Relational openness in the phenomenology of nature

These then link outward into ongoing clusters such as [[Phenomenology]], [[Embodiment]], [[Nature as Intertwining]].

3. Writing Papers Through Connected Notes

When a paper is due, ecological theology, phenomenology, ESR or PCC research, I never begin with a blank page. I begin with a map of notes already in conversation.

The workflow:

  1. Create a Paper Hub note as a central node for the project:
    • thesis draft
    • reading list
    • list of relevant permanent notes
  2. Pull in linked notes Using Dataview or simple backlinks, I gather every relevant piece of thinking I’ve already stored.
  3. Assemble the argument The writing becomes an act of weaving connections rather than inventing from scratch.
  4. Export to Word/PDF Once the draft is complete, I move into Word for Chicago-style citations and final formatting.

This lets my academic work grow organically out of months of lived reflection rather than rushed, isolated writing.

4. Daily Notes as Phenomenological and Ecological Anchors

Every morning’s Daily Note includes:

  • weather + sunrise/sunset
  • tracking notes on the black walnut
  • dreams, moods, or somatic impressions
  • any quote or insight from my reading

These small entries, over time, become a longitudinal phenomenological dataset—especially helpful for my ecological intentionality and process-relational work.

5. The Vault as an Ecology

Obsidian mirrors how I’m thinking about the world in my CIIS work:

everything is connected, everything participates, and meaning emerges through relation rather than isolation.

My vault has three organizing principles:

  • Maps of content (big conceptual hubs)
  • Atomic permanent notes (ideas per note tagged well)
  • Ephemeral notes (daily, in-class, or quick captures)

The magic is not in perfect organization… it’s in the interplay.

6. Why This Works for Me

This workflow keeps my scholarship:

  • Ecological: ideas grow from interaction
  • Phenomenological: grounded in lived experience
  • Process-relational: always evolving
  • Practical: every note has a future use

It’s become the backbone not only of my life and coursework, but of my dissertation path, Tree Sit Journals, Carolina Ecology posts, and even sermon writing.

Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being

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

Continue reading Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being

Plasma, Consciousness, and the Phenomenological Cosmos: Relational Fields

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

Continue reading Plasma, Consciousness, and the Phenomenological Cosmos: Relational Fields

Edith Stein’s The Science of the Cross

I occasionally get asked about my PhD work and why Edith Stein‘s The Science of the Cross (good article here) is such a big factor in my own thinking and research. I wanted to put together a quick overview of this incredibly important but under-read work.

Edith Stein’s Science of the Cross has become essential for my own work on The Ecology of the Cross because Stein refuses to treat the Cross as a mere doctrinal moment or as raw suffering. Instead, she approaches it as a structure of perception, a way of knowing and inhabiting the real. When she calls it a science, she means that the Cross forms a disciplined way of seeing or something that takes root inside a person like a seed and slowly reshapes how they relate to the world (p. xxvi). Reading Stein in this way helped me name what I’ve been experiencing in my own project in that cruciform consciousness isn’t just theological; it’s ecological. It’s a way of perceiving the world that emerges from relationship, participation, and transformation rather than abstraction. Her work gave me language for something I had long sensed, that the Cross can reorient the self toward the world with deeper attentiveness, humility, and openness.

Continue reading Edith Stein’s The Science of the Cross

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abstract

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

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

R.I.P. Phyllis Trible

One of those amazing thinkers and scholars who helped shape my own theological journey (first read her work as an Undergrad at Wofford College, and it both answered and provoked questions I had been and continue to wrestle with), along with countless others.

Her work on rhetorical criticism and the book of Jonah is still one of my favorites and a must-read.

Union Theological Seminary: In Memoriam: Dr. Phyllis Trible

Dr. Trible’s scholarship reshaped biblical studies, insisting that the academy and the church confront both the beauty and the brutality of our sacred texts.

Through groundbreaking works—including God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality and Texts of Terror—she taught generations to read with literary rigor, ethical clarity, and courageous empathy. Her method of close rhetorical reading opened space for women and other marginalized people long silenced by interpretive traditions, and her teaching formed scholars, pastors, and activists who carry her insights into pulpits, classrooms, and movements for justice around the world.

Pope Leo’s Ice Blessing

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

Emphasis mine in the quote here…

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

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

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

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

Lost Connections

Great post from Merianna about relational being and our real need to have connections that will help us imagine our way out of our modern spiritual crisis in the context of Hurricane Helene…

Lost Connection – by Merianna Harrelson:

Without thinking I asked, “Where you all right? How about your house? How about your neighborhood? Do you need anything?” The lost connection actually helped me search for connection with complete strangers. Suddenly, no one was irritated or frustrated waiting in line or waiting for a plug to charge what they needed. Instead we were all thankful to see each other.

A year later as I think about the way we as a community started to congregate in places that had power, I realized that this is what is missing. We have become so used to being connected all the time to news streams, events from around the world, and posts and comments that we have lost connection to the people we pass every day. We have forgotten that these connections are the connections that remind us that we are all God’s beloved children and we have all lived through something that has shaken us to our core.

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

Greening Ancient Wisdom for Today’s Crisis

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

Hildegard’s Viriditas: Greening Power and Divine Immanence

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

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

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

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

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

The Cross as Tree of Life: A Paradigm of Kenosis

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

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

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

Sacred Entanglement: Communion Beyond the Human

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

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

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

Kenosis, Viriditas, and Living in Communion

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

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

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

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