Tag: edith stein

Empathy and Imagination as Practices of Hope

It’s not difficult to feel pessimistic right now, especially after last night’s State of the Union and all of its divisiveness on all sides of the aisles, all impotent with the seemingly slouching towards Gomorrah.

The thing that we’re all afraid of has multiple names beyond human words.

Every morning news cycle seems to stack another layer onto an already crowded horizon from ecological instability, biodiversity loss, accelerating AI systems, widening economic uncertainty, political fracture, school shootings, and the persistent drumbeat of conflict. None of these is an abstract trend. They show up in the texture of daily life… in energy debates here in the Carolinas, in conversations about data centers and water use, in classrooms, churches, and family tables, and even in the quiet unease many of us feel about the technological systems reshaping our attention and labor.

The temptation is to respond with denial, despair, or an eternal, paralyzing grief. Denial insists things aren’t really that bad. Despair insists nothing can be done. Both short-circuit meaningful engagement. The algorthims program us to this more than we program the algorithms. Same as it ever was.

But for me, the path toward something like grounded optimism has increasingly come down to two intertwined capacities: empathy and imagination.

Not optimism as cheerfulness or optimism as naive confidence. But optimism is a disciplined openness to possibility within real limits.

Empathy as a Way of Knowing

Empathy is often treated as a moral trait, something we either have or lack (or should eschew). But phenomenologically, it is better understood as a mode of perception.

Edith Stein described empathy not as projecting ourselves into another, nor as observing them from a safe distance, but as a distinctive act in which another’s experience is given to us as genuinely theirs… irreducibly other, yet meaningfully present. Empathy does not collapse difference. It allows relation without possession.

When expanded beyond human-to-human encounters, this becomes an ecological capacity.

To practice ecological empathy is to recognize that forests, rivers, species, and landscapes are not merely resources or backdrops. They are participants in shared conditions of life. Sitting with the black walnut in my backyard here in Spartanburg has taught me more about this than any abstract theory. The tree does not “speak” in human language, yet its seasonal rhythms, vulnerabilities, and persistence disclose a form of presence that invites response. Empathy here is not sentimental projection. It is attentiveness to relational reality.

This matters for optimism because despair often grows from abstraction. When the world is reduced to statistics, models, and catastrophic projections, it becomes psychologically uninhabitable. Empathy returns us to situated relation. It anchors concern in concrete encounters rather than overwhelming totals.

We do not save “the environment.” We learn to live differently with the places and beings already shaping our lives.

Imagination as the Extension of Empathy

If empathy opens us to the reality of others, imagination opens us to possible futures with them.

Imagination is frequently dismissed as escapist or unrealistic, but historically it has been one of humanity’s most practical tools. Every social institution, technological system, ethical reform, or ecological restoration effort began as an imagined alternative to what currently existed.

The crises we face today are not only technical. They are narrative and perceptual. Climate models can tell us what may happen. Economic forecasts can outline risks. AI researchers can map trajectories. But none of these, by themselves, generate livable futures. That requires the imaginative capacity to envision forms of coexistence that do not yet fully exist.

This is why ecological thinkers from Thomas Berry to Joanna Macy have emphasized the importance of story. Without imagination, data produces paralysis. With imagination, data becomes orientation.

Imagination does not deny danger. It prevents danger from becoming destiny.

Why These Matter in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence intensifies this dynamic.

AI systems increasingly mediate how we work, communicate, and interpret information. They promise efficiency while also raising questions about labor, creativity, authorship, and the ecological costs of computation itself. It is easy to frame this moment as a competition between humans and machines, or as a technological inevitability moving beyond human control.

Empathy and imagination disrupt that framing.

Empathy reminds us that technological systems are embedded in human and ecological contexts. Data centers draw on water and energy. Algorithms shape social behavior. Design choices reflect values. These systems are not autonomous destinies but relational infrastructures whose impacts are distributed across communities and landscapes.

Imagination, meanwhile, allows us to ask better questions than “Will AI replace us?” Instead we can ask: What forms of human and more-than-human flourishing should technology support? What would a genuinely ecological technological future look like? What practices of attention, education, and governance might guide development in that direction?

Without imagination, AI becomes fate, but with imagination, it becomes a field of ethical and ecological design.

Optimism as a Practice, Not a Prediction

The kind of optimism I find credible today is not based on predictions about outcomes. It is based on practices that keep possibilities open.

Empathy keeps us relationally awake.
Imagination keeps us temporally open.

Together, they resist the two dominant distortions of our moment: the reduction of the world to objects and the reduction of the future to inevitabilities.

When we practice empathy, we perceive that the world is still alive with agencies, relationships, and meanings that exceed our control. When we practice imagination, we acknowledge that the future is still under construction, shaped not only by systems but by perception, story, and choice.

This does not eliminate risk. It does not guarantee success. But it sustains participation.

And participation, more than prediction, is what hope requires.

A Quiet Form of Hope

Some mornings, optimism looks less like a grand vision and more like a small act of attention.

Watching the black walnut shift through seasons. Seeing our children learn to perceive and adapt to new challenges, from math problems to social interactions to losing the championship in a youth basketball league, and listening carefully to a student’s question. Reimagining how a church, classroom, or local community might respond differently to ecological pressures. Writing, teaching, or building something that nudges perception toward relation instead of domination.

None of these solves global crises on its own, but they do cultivate the perceptual habits from which meaningful change becomes thinkable.

Empathy grounds us in the reality of shared life while imagination opens that shared life toward futures not yet fixed.

In a time when so much feels predetermined, these two capacities remain profoundly human… and profoundly necessary.

And for me, that is reason enough to remain cautiously, actively optimistic.

Presentation at Yale on “Returning to the Roots: Edith Stein, Empathy, and Ecological Intentionality”

Here’s my full presentation for Yale Divinity’s 2026 Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology that was held last week (February 2026)… what a great time to be back at Yale Divinity after graduating in 2002!

Roots of Cruciform Consciousness: Edith Stein, Empathy, and the Ground of Ecological Intentionality

Sam Harrelson, PhD Student, California Institute of Integral Studies
Yale Graduate Conference on Religion and Ecology
February 2026

The theme of this gathering invites us to consider whether what we need for the future might already lie beneath our feet. Such language can easily be heard metaphorically, pointing toward ancestral wisdom, inherited traditions, or the rediscovery of forgotten practices. Yet phenomenologically, the claim may be more literal and methodological than it first appears. What lies beneath our feet is not only soil or memory but the perceptual ground through which the world becomes meaningful at all. The question of roots is therefore not only historical or ecological but experiential. It concerns how the world appears to us, and how we appear within it.

This paper proposes that Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy offers a way to rethink ecological consciousness precisely at this level of perception. Stein’s account of empathy, developed in her early work On the Problem of Empathy, does more than explain how one human being understands another. It articulates the structure through which another center of experience becomes present to consciousness at all. When considered in light of contemporary ecological crisis, Stein’s analysis suggests that the breakdown we face is not only technological, political, or economic. It is also perceptual. The challenge before us may therefore involve not simply new policies or innovations, but a re-rooting of awareness itself.

Empathy as the Disclosure of Another Life

Stein famously resists two common misunderstandings of empathy. Empathy is neither projection nor inference. It is not the imaginative insertion of myself into another’s position, nor is it a logical deduction based on external signs. Instead, empathy is a distinctive intentional act in which another’s experience is given to me as genuinely theirs. I encounter the other not as an extension of myself, nor as a merely observable object, but as a subject whose interior life is present while remaining irreducibly other.

This formulation is subtle but decisive. Empathy preserves difference while establishing relation. It allows proximity without collapse, recognition without possession. The other’s experience appears as both accessible and inexhaustible. I grasp something of their joy, suffering, or intention, yet never exhaust it. Their life exceeds my comprehension even as it becomes present to me.

What is often overlooked is that Stein does not treat empathy primarily as a moral achievement. It is not first a virtue or emotional capacity. Rather, empathy belongs to the ontological structure of consciousness itself. The world we inhabit is never neutral or empty. It is always already populated by other living centers of activity whose presence shapes the field of experience. Empathy, in this sense, is not an optional addition to human life but a basic condition for the appearance of a shared world.

Seen from this perspective, empathy precedes ethics. It grounds the possibility of ethics by disclosing that we do not inhabit the world alone. The recognition of another’s interiority is not a later interpretive step but an original feature of how the world shows up at all.

Ecological Crisis as Perceptual Crisis

If Stein is right, then the ecological crisis may be understood partly as a crisis in this very structure of perception. The devastation of ecosystems is not only the result of poor management or technological excess. It is also enabled by a way of seeing in which the natural world appears primarily as an object rather than as a community.

Forests become timber, rivers become resources, soil becomes substrate, and landscapes appear as inventories of use-value rather than as living fields of relation. In phenomenological terms, the world is flattened into availability. Once this perceptual reduction takes hold, exploitation follows almost inevitably. What no longer appears as expressive or relational becomes disposable.

This does not mean that ecological destruction results simply from individual failures of empathy. Rather, it suggests that modern technological culture has cultivated a habitual mode of perception in which relational presence is systematically obscured. The more-than-human world becomes intelligible primarily through abstraction, measurement, and utility. The experiential sense of encountering other forms of life as centers of activity recedes from view.

Stein’s phenomenology offers a way to articulate what has been lost. If empathy is the structure through which another life becomes present, then ecological renewal may require not only new forms of governance but renewed perception. The task is not to sentimentalize nature or project human consciousness onto nonhuman beings. It is to recover the capacity to encounter the world as populated by lives that exceed our own perspective.

Toward Ecological Intentionality

To name this possibility, I use the term ecological intentionality. In phenomenological language, intentionality refers to the directedness of consciousness toward the world. Ecological intentionality designates a mode of awareness oriented not toward mastery or control but toward participatory belonging.

Such intentionality recognizes that existence unfolds within networks of interdependence. Living beings present themselves as centers of activity whose interior dynamics cannot be reduced to mechanical explanation alone. Their life is not identical to ours, yet neither is it merely inert. Stein’s careful distinction between empathy and projection is crucial here. We need not claim to fully understand another life in order to acknowledge that it exceeds objecthood.

Ecological intentionality, therefore, involves a shift in posture rather than an expansion of knowledge. It is less about acquiring new information and more about recovering a different way of encountering what is already present. The world begins to appear again as a field of relations in which we are participants rather than external observers.

The Cruciform Pattern of Ecological Life

At this point, the cross can be reexamined phenomenologically. Within Christian theology, the cross is often interpreted primarily as the site of human redemption or divine sacrifice. Yet it can also be read more broadly as a pattern of relational existence. The cross marks the intersection of vulnerability and renewal, finitude and transformation. It signifies that life does not persist by escaping death but through processes that pass through it.

When viewed in ecological terms, this pattern becomes strikingly familiar. Soil forms through decay. Forest ecosystems depend upon cycles of decomposition and regeneration. Nutrients circulate through networks of exchange among fungi, plants, animals, and microorganisms. Life flourishes not despite finitude but through it. Descent into the earth becomes the condition for new emergence.

The cruciform pattern therefore resonates with the very processes unfolding beneath our feet. It names a structure in which loss and renewal, limitation and possibility, are inseparable. Such a reading does not reduce theology to biology or vice versa. Instead, it reveals a shared logic of relational becoming that traverses both domains.

Embodiment, Finitude, and Participation

Stein’s later philosophical and spiritual writings deepen this ecological resonance. In Finite and Eternal Being, she portrays the human person as simultaneously grounded in finitude and opened toward transcendence. This openness does not remove us from the world but situates us more deeply within it. Embodiment is not an obstacle to spiritual life but its very condition.

Through our bodies, we are always already embedded within networks of dependence. We breathe air shaped by ecosystems, consume food produced through soil and climate, and live within material processes we neither originate nor control. Finitude, for Stein, is not deficiency but location. To be finite is to be situated, and to be situated is to belong.

Her reflections in The Science of the Cross extend this insight into explicitly theological territory. Transformation occurs not through domination or escape but through participation in patterns of vulnerability and love. Read ecologically, this suggests that the way forward lies not in transcending earthly conditions but in entering them more fully. The acceptance of interdependence becomes the ground of spiritual as well as ecological maturity.

Place-Based Attention

These themes remain abstract unless they are anchored in lived experience. For me, this anchoring occurs quite literally in the Carolina Piedmont, where I live and work. As part of my research practice, I track the seasonal rhythms of a black walnut tree in my yard. Over the course of the year, I watch its cycles of dormancy, budding, leafing, fruiting, and decay.

Such observation does not transform the tree into a human subject. Yet neither does it remain a mere object. It appears instead as a living center of activity whose rhythms intersect with mine. Its shade shapes my summer afternoons. Its leaves enrich the soil each autumn. Birds and insects inhabit its branches. Time itself becomes visible through its changes.

This practice does not solve climate change or halt biodiversity loss. But it reconfigures perception. The tree ceases to be a resource or backdrop and becomes a participant in a shared field of life. Stein’s phenomenology helps articulate what occurs in such moments. Empathy, understood broadly as the disclosure of another center of life, makes possible a renewed sense of belonging within the world.

Returning to the Roots

To return to the roots, then, is not primarily to recover a lost past. It is to return to the participatory ground of perception itself. When this ground is obscured, the world appears inert and disposable. When it is recovered, the world appears again as expressive, relational, and alive.

From this perspective, ecological responsibility no longer presents itself merely as an external obligation imposed by ethical systems or environmental policies. It emerges instead as the natural expression of inhabiting a shared world. The recognition of belonging precedes and grounds the call to care.

In this sense, what we need may indeed already lie beneath our feet. Not only in the soil and its intricate networks of life, but in the deeper phenomenological roots through which the world first becomes present to us at all.

References

Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Trans. Waltraut Stein. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989.

Stein, Edith. Finite and Eternal Being. Trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.

Stein, Edith. The Science of the Cross. Trans. Josephine Koeppel. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.

History as Empathic Ecology: Edith Stein and the Practice of Ecological Empathy

There are moments in academic life when a concept stops being merely theoretical and becomes a lived practice. My presentation this past week at Christendom College’s Eternity In Time (Thinking With the Church Through History) conference on Edith Stein and what I’ve been calling ecological empathy has been one of those moments for me. My conference presentation is below if you’d like to read it, and I’ll post the full, longer paper shortly.

What began as a phenomenological question about how we know another’s experience is real has slowly widened into a question about how we inhabit history, land, and the more-than-human world at all.

Stein’s early work On the Problem of Empathy is often read within psychology or philosophy of mind. But her insight cuts much deeper. Empathy, for Stein, is not projection and not detached observation (probably my best post about this concept so far). It is a distinctive act in which another’s experience becomes present to me as other. I do not become the other, and I do not reduce them to an object. Instead, I encounter a real center of experience that exceeds me.

This structure has profound implications beyond interpersonal ethics. It suggests that knowing is always relational, always asymmetrical, and always grounded in encounter rather than mastery.

From Historical Method to Empathic Participation

In my talk, I suggested that if we take Stein seriously, history itself becomes an empathic practice.

Modern historical method often imagines itself as neutral reconstruction: gather sources, analyze context, produce explanation. But Stein’s phenomenology invites a different posture. The past is not merely a dataset. It is the trace of lived experience. To study history responsibly is therefore not just to explain events but to encounter the lives, intentions, and worlds that once unfolded within them.

This does not mean sentimental identification. Stein explicitly resists that. Instead, it means acknowledging that historical understanding involves a disciplined openness to experiences that are irreducibly not our own.

History, in this sense, becomes a form of relational knowledge… a practice of attending to the presence of others across time.

The Creaturely Horizon

Where this becomes especially compelling for my own work is when we widen the circle of empathy beyond human history.

If empathy is the recognition of another center of experience that is not reducible to me, then ecological awareness begins to look like an expansion of empathic perception. Landscapes, species, watersheds, and ecosystems are not simply backdrops to human drama. They are fields of lived processes, histories, and agencies that exceed human intention.

This is what I’ve been calling the creaturely horizon. It is the recognition that human life always unfolds within a wider community of beings whose existence is not defined by our narratives, economies, or theologies, even though those systems constantly attempt to do just that.

Here in the Carolina Piedmont, this is not abstract. The Pacolet (and Tyger) watershed near our home carries layers of agricultural history, Indigenous displacement, industrial transformation, and ongoing ecological stress. To walk along its edges is to encounter not just scenery but a dense historical and ecological presence. The river is not an object of study alone. It is a participant in a shared world.

Ecological empathy begins precisely at this point: when perception shifts from viewing land as resource to encountering it as a living historical partner.

Empathy, Ecology, and the Limits of Control

One of Stein’s most important contributions is her insistence that empathy preserves difference. The other never becomes fully transparent to me. There is always excess, always depth, always opacity.

Ecologically, this insight is crucial.

Many environmental crises emerge from the illusion that the world can be fully known, predicted, and controlled. Industrial agriculture, extractive economies, and technocratic planning all rely on the assumption that complexity can be reduced to manageable variables.

Stein’s phenomenology undermines this posture at its root. If genuine knowing involves encountering another reality that exceeds my grasp, then ecological knowledge must also involve humility. The more we understand ecosystems, the more we encounter their irreducible complexity.

Ecological empathy therefore does not produce domination. It produces attentiveness, patience, and restraint.

It shifts the question from “How do we manage this system?” to “How do we live responsibly within a world that is not ours alone?”

Toward an Ecological Practice of History

This perspective also reframes the study of Church history, theology, and religious tradition, which has been central to my recent work.

Too often, religious history is narrated as a story of doctrines, institutions, or human conflicts. But if we read it empathically and ecologically, we begin to see something else: traditions emerge within landscapes, climates, agricultural systems, and material constraints. Monastic rhythms follow seasonal cycles. Liturgical calendars mirror ecological time. Theologies of creation reflect lived encounters with land and weather as much as abstract metaphysics.

To study religious history responsibly is therefore to attend not only to texts and ideas but to the ecological worlds in which they were lived.

History, then, becomes not just human memory but a layered field of creaturely relations.

Ecological Empathy as Spiritual Practice

For me, this is not only an academic argument. It is also a spiritual practice.

Ecological empathy begins in small acts of attention. Watching how light changes across the backyard in late afternoon. Noticing the seasonal shifts in the black walnut tree I’ve been tracking. Listening to the sounds of insects returning in early spring. These are not sentimental exercises. They are ways of training perception to recognize the presence of other lives unfolding alongside ours.

Stein helps clarify that empathy is not something we manufacture emotionally. It is something we cultivate perceptually. It begins with learning to encounter others as real.

In a time of ecological crisis, this shift may be more urgent than any policy proposal. Laws and technologies matter. But without transformed perception, they remain fragile.

Ecological empathy invites us to inhabit the world differently… not as managers standing outside it, but as participants within a shared, creaturely history.

Conference Presentation Text

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

Sam Harrelson
Christendom College, Feb 2026

Conference Presentation Script

Good afternoon, and thank you for the invitation to be part of this conversation.

Pope Francis recently called for a renewed study of Church history, warning against what he described as an “overly angelic conception of the Church,” one that forgets her spots, wrinkles, and historical embeddedness. His concern is not simply methodological. It is pastoral and ethical. If the Church forgets her historical entanglement with the world, she risks forgetting her responsibility within it.

Today I want to suggest that Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy offers a surprisingly powerful way to rethink what it means to study Church history at all. My claim is simple:
If we take Stein seriously, history becomes not only an intellectual discipline but also an empathetic practice… and potentially an ecological one.

Stein’s early work On the Problem of Empathy asks a deceptively basic question: how do we know another’s experience is real?

Her answer resists both projection and detachment. Empathy, for Stein, is neither imagining the other as myself nor observing them as an object. It is a distinctive act in which another’s experience is given to me as genuinely theirs… irreducibly other, yet meaningfully accessible.

Empathy therefore has structure. It involves:

First, the recognition of another as a subject.
Second, an entry into the meaning of their experience.
And third, a return to oneself, now transformed by that encounter.

This is not merely psychology. It is a phenomenology of relational knowing. We come to truth not by standing outside relationships, but by entering them responsibly.

What happens if we bring this insight into the study of Church history?

Too often, historical study oscillates between two poles.

On one side, there is triumphalist narration: the Church as a seamless unfolding of divine purpose.
On the other, there is purely critical detachment: the Church as a sociological object to be explained from the outside.

Both approaches, in different ways, fail Stein’s test. One collapses alterity into ideology. The other refuses encounter altogether.

A Steinian approach to Church history would instead treat the past as something we must empathically encounter.

To study a council, a missionary movement, a devotional practice, or a theological dispute is not only to catalog events. It is to ask:
What worlds of meaning were lived here?
What fears, hopes, and constraints shaped these actions?
What forms of life were made possible… and what forms were foreclosed?

History, in this sense, becomes an act of disciplined attentiveness to lived experience across time.

But Stein’s framework pushes us further than this.

Because once empathy is understood as an openness to real otherness, we face a deeper question:

Who counts as the “other” in historical understanding?

Stein herself focuses primarily on human persons. Yet the structure she identifies does not logically stop there. The Church’s history has always unfolded not only among human actors but within landscapes, climates, material resources, animals, and built environments.

The monasteries of medieval Europe were shaped by forests, rivers, and agricultural cycles.

Missionary expansion often followed trade routes, mineral extraction, and imperial ecologies.

Liturgical art depends on pigments, wood, stone, and labor drawn from specific places.

These are not background conditions. They are part of the creaturely field in which Christian history becomes possible.

If Stein teaches us that knowledge requires acknowledging the real presence of the other, then historical study must also attend to these more-than-human participants in the Church’s story.

This is what I call empathic ecology… or, in my broader work, ecological intentionality.

Here the tradition itself offers companions for Stein.

Hildegard of Bingen’s notion of viriditas, the greening vitality of creation, portrays divine life as manifest in the flourishing of the natural world. For Hildegard, spiritual history and ecological vitality are inseparable.

In contemporary theology, Leonardo Boff’s integral ecology similarly insists that Christian ethics cannot be disentangled from the well-being of Earth’s systems and communities.

Stein provides the phenomenological grammar that helps explain why these insights matter methodologically. If understanding requires empathic openness to real others, then historical truth demands attention not only to human intentions but to the material and ecological conditions that co-shaped them.

Let me offer one brief example.

In the nineteenth century, European engagement with the ancient Near East brought Assyrian reliefs and artifacts into Western museums and theological discourse. These objects were treated as confirmations of biblical history and symbols of civilizational continuity.

Yet their removal also depended on imperial infrastructures, environmental extraction, and the displacement of local cultural ecologies. The Church’s encounter with these artifacts cannot be understood fully without recognizing the ecological and political networks that enabled their movement.

A purely doctrinal history might note the apologetic value of these discoveries.
A purely political history might critique imperial appropriation.

A Steinian, empathic-ecological history asks something more layered:
What worlds of meaning were opened and closed here… for scholars, for local communities, and for the landscapes themselves?

Such questions do not dilute historical rigor. They deepen it.

What does this mean for Catholic higher education today?

If Church history is taught merely as a sequence of events or doctrines, students may inherit either nostalgia or cynicism.

But if history is taught as an empathic encounter with the lived, creaturely reality of the Church across time, it can cultivate something else entirely: humility, responsibility, and solidarity.

Students begin to see that the Church’s past is not an untouchable monument. It is a field of relationships still shaping our present obligations.

In this way, historical study becomes formative rather than merely informative. It trains perception. It forms conscience. It prepares a mode of witness that is less triumphalist and more cruciform… grounded in attention to vulnerability, interdependence, and the real costs of historical action.

Let me close with this thought.

Edith Stein teaches that empathy is not sentimental identification. It is a disciplined openness to the reality of another. It changes how we know, and therefore how we act.

If we bring that insight into the study of Church history, we may discover that the task is not simply to remember what the Church has done.

The deeper task is to learn how to perceive the Church’s past truthfully… within the full web of human and creaturely relations that made it possible.

Such perception does not weaken faith. It grounds it.

And perhaps this is precisely what Pope Francis is asking of us:
not a history that idealizes the Church,
but one that helps the Church inhabit time… and the living world… with deeper honesty, responsibility, and hope.

Thank you.

Three Conferences, One Thread: Preparing for Next Week’s Presentations

I’ve learned over my time as a PhD student in the Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion program at the California Institute of Integral Studies that there are seasons in academic and creative life when the work accumulates quietly. Reading stacks grow taller, my notes deepen, and ideas circle back on themselves as I continue reading and writing. Conversations with students, landscapes, and texts start forming into something I can feel taking shape long before it is spoken aloud.

And then there are weeks when those threads surface publicly, all at once!

Next week is one of those weeks, for sure. I’ll be presenting in three different conference settings across the country (while acknowledging the ecological damage caused by air travel)… beginning in Chicago (probably my favorite city, not just due to the fact that I’m a major Cubs fan), then New Haven, and finally in Virginia before heading back home to the Carolinas. Each gathering has its own audience, tone, and intellectual atmosphere, but I think all three are connected by the same underlying set of questions that have been shaping my work in recent years.

Rather than thinking of them as separate events, I’ve started to see them as three vantage points onto a shared terrain as I finalize my thoughts and slides.

DePaul Symposium: Representation, Neighbor, and Visual Ethics

February 17, 2026

The week begins in Chicago at DePaul University, where I’ll participate in a symposium organized by the Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art in partnership with the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology titled “And Who Is My Neighbor?” Refuge, Sanctuary, and Representation in Modern Art and Visual Culture.”

My presentation here (“Ecologies of Refuge: Trees, Crosses, and the Art of Neighborliness“) engages questions of perception and ethical formation through visual culture. The core concern is simple, but I think demanding… images do not merely depict worlds… they train us how to see them (channeling Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, Husserl, etc). They shape who counts as neighbor, what counts as presence, and what counts as belonging.

Also, this conference reconnects me with my long-standing interests in ancient and medieval art and museum work, but through lenses sharpened by ecological and phenomenological study. It feels less like returning to earlier territory and more like rediscovering it with different sensitivities.

Yale Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology

February 19–20

From Chicago, I head to New Haven for the 10th annual Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology at Yale Divinity School. This year’s theme, “Return to the Roots: How We Move Forward,” invites participants to reflect on ancestral, ecological, and spiritual grounding in the face of contemporary crisis.

I graduated from Yale Divinity with a MAR in Religion and Literature in 2002, so this will be a sort of homecoming to be doing academic work on campus again, rather than just visiting to see all the changes and campus improvements!

The conference is organized by graduate students and provides an interdisciplinary venue for emerging scholars to share research across theology, environmental humanities, philosophy, ethics, and related fields. It has become a meaningful meeting place within a field that seeks to reconsider how narratives and practices shape human relationships with the environment.

The theme itself asks how place-based relations and inherited traditions might tether communities to hope and guide collective futures… even posing the possibility that what sustains us may already be “right below our feet.”

My presentation is closest to the heart of my PhD work at CIIS so far. I’ll be exploring ecological intentionality as both a philosophical framework and a lived practice. Drawing on phenomenology, process thought, and local observation, my presentation presses toward a shift in which intentionality is not merely a cognitive function but a relational unfolding through environments, histories, and bodies.

This context is particularly exciting because the conference explicitly encourages interdisciplinary engagement across religion, ethics, science, and ecological practice.

Eternity in Time: Christendom College

February 20–21

My week of travel concludes in Virginia at Christendom College for the conference “Eternity in Time: Thinking with the Church Through History.” This gathering brings together scholars across the humanities to reconsider the role of historical consciousness in theological and cultural life.

The conference’s framing invites reflection on how history shapes philosophical and theological reasoning, engaging topics such as patristic thought, doctrinal development, liturgical culture, and the relationship between faith and intellectual inquiry.

I am intrigued by the idea here that historical understanding is not antiquarian. It fosters ethical responsibility and communal awareness by situating human life within temporal continuity. I think we can all take something from that insight.

My contribution here leans into theological and historical retrieval, continuing work connected to the Ecology of the Cross. I’m interested in how premodern theological imagination treated materiality, suffering, and transformation in ways that still hold interpretive potential today (Hildegard, Aquinas, and Stein).

This setting will probably offer a very different conversational atmosphere from the Yale gathering, and that difference is what makes the week meaningful when I look at the whole picture. The encounter between ecological phenomenology and historically grounded theological discourse creates productive friction. Those frictions often generate clarity in my experience.

Ongoing

Preparing these presentations simultaneously has helped me clarify that my work is not best understood as a collection of separate projects but as a continuous effort to cultivate coherence across domains that are often artificially divided… theology, ecology, perception, art, pedagogy, and history, technology (AI, etc).

So If I’m being honest, the main takeaways for me as I sharpen my dissertation focus are:

  • Attention as ethical practice
  • Perception as relational participation
  • Knowledge as encounter rather than extraction

I’d say these takeaways have been shaped as much by teaching in the Carolinas for almost 2 decades and by raising a family with five incredibly unique children as by seminars and research in the archives of books that should be read more. Scholarship that drifts too far from lived worlds loses vitality. I try to keep that tether intact and it’s one reason I’m glad I waited until I was 46 to begin my PhD journey (as irrational as that may sound).

There is always anticipation leading into weeks like this, but also humility. Conferences are not stages for final statements, but are provisional gatherings… spaces where ideas meet other minds and inevitably change shape.

I’m most interested in the conversations that follow the presentations. Those exchanges are where the work actually develops as I’ve learned at the American Academy of Religion, or ISSRNC, or Center for Process Studies, or Affiliate Summit, or AdTech, or Web2.0, or Society of Biblical Literature, or the numerous edu-conferences I’ve presented to over the last 25 years of my meandering career.

We are still learning how to be addressed by the worlds we inhabit, after all.

I’ll post up my slides and thoughts after the travels wind down late next week!

When Agency Becomes Ecological: AI, Labor, and the Redistribution of Attention

I read this piece in Futurism this morning, highlighting anxiety among employees at Anthropic about the very tools they are building. Agent-based AI systems designed to automate professional tasks are advancing quickly, and even insiders are expressing unease that these systems could displace forms of work that have long anchored identity and livelihood. The familiar story is one of replacement with machines and agents taking jobs, efficiency outpacing meaning, and productivity outrunning dignity.

“It kind of feels like I’m coming to work every day to put myself out of a job.”

That narrative is understandable. It is also incomplete.

It assumes agency is something discrete, something possessed. Either humans have it or ai agents do. Either labor is done by us or by them. This framing reflects a deeply modern inheritance in which action is imagined as individual, bounded, and owned. But if we step back and look phenomenologically, ecologically, even theologically, agency rarely appears that way in lived experience.

However, agency unfolds relationally. It arises through environments, histories, infrastructures, bodies, tools, and attentional fields that exceed any single actor. Whitehead described events as occasions within webs of relation rather than isolated units of causation. Merleau-Ponty reminded us that perception itself is co-constituted with the world it encounters. Edith Stein traced empathy as a participatory structure that bridges subjectivities. In each of these traditions, action is never solitary. It is ecological.

Seen from this vantage, AI agents do not simply replace agency. They redistribute it.

Workplaces become assemblages of human judgment, algorithmic suggestion, interface design, energy supply, and data pipelines. Decisions emerge from entanglement while expertise shifts from individual mastery toward collaborative navigation of hybrid systems. What unsettles people is not merely job loss, but the destabilization of familiar coordinates that once made agency legible to us.

This destabilization is not unprecedented. Guild laborers faced mechanization during the Industrial Revolution(s). Scribes faced it with the advent of the printing press. Monastics faced it when clocks began structuring devotion instead of bells and sunlight. Each moment involved a rearrangement of where attention was placed and how authority was structured. The present transition is another such rearrangement, though unfolding at computational speed.

Attention is the deeper currency here.

Agent systems promise efficiency precisely because they absorb attentional burden. They monitor, synthesize, draft, suggest, and route. But attention is not neutral bandwidth. It is a formative ecological force. Where attention flows, worlds take shape. If attentional responsibility migrates outward into technical systems, the question is not whether humans lose agency. It is what kinds of perception and responsiveness remain cultivated in us.

This is the moment where the conversation often stops short as discussions of automation typically orbit labor markets or productivity metrics or stock values. Rarely do they ask what habits of awareness diminish when engagement becomes mediated through algorithmic intermediaries. What forms of ecological attunement grow quieter when interaction shifts further toward abstraction.

And rarer still is acknowledgment of the material ecology enabling this shift.

Every AI agent relies on infrastructure that consumes electricity, water, land, and minerals. Data centers do not hover in conceptual space. They occupy watersheds. They reshape local grids. They alter thermal patterns. They compete with agricultural and municipal electrical grid and water demands. These realities are not peripheral to agency, but are conditions through which agency is enacted.

In places like here in the Carolinas, where digital infrastructure continues expanding exponentially, it seems the redistribution of agency is already tangible. Decisions about automation are inseparable from decisions about energy sourcing, zoning, and water allocation. The ecological footprint of computation folds into local landscapes long before its outputs appear in professional workflows.

Agency, again, proves ecological.

To recognize this is not to reject AI systems or retreat into Luddite nostalgia. The aim is attentiveness rather than resistance. Transitions of this magnitude call for widening perception (and resulting ethics) rather than narrowing judgment. If agency is relational, then responsibility must be relational as well. Designing, deploying, regulating, and using these tools all participate in shaping the ecologies they inhabit.

Perhaps the most generative question emerging from this moment is not whether artificial intelligence will take our agency. It is whether we can learn to inhabit redistributed agency wisely. Whether we can remain perceptive participants rather than passive recipients. Whether we can sustain forms of attention capable of noticing both digital transformation and the soils, waters, and energies through which it flows.

Late in the afternoon, sitting near the black walnut I’ve been tracking the past year, these abstractions tend to settle. Agency there is unmistakably ecological as we’d define it. Wind, insects, light, decay, growth, and memory intermingle without boundary disputes. Nothing acts alone, and nothing possesses its influence outright. The tree neither competes with nor yields to agency. It participates.

Our technologies, despite their novelty, do not remove us from that condition. They draw us deeper into it. The question is whether we will learn to notice.

Empathy Is Not Agreement

After writing recently about empathy, I have noticed something predictable beginning to surface in conversations. Some readers assume that defending empathy is the same as defending agreement. Others assume that empathy asks us to suspend judgment, blur convictions, or collapse differences into sentiment. Others hear the word and imagine a soft moralism that refuses conflict altogether.

None of that is what I mean. And none of it is what the phenomenological tradition means when it takes empathy seriously.

Empathy is not agreement.

Agreement belongs to the realm of conclusions. Empathy belongs to the realm of perception. Agreement concerns what we affirm. Empathy concerns what we are able to see.

Those two movements can overlap, but they are not the same thing.

When Edith Stein described empathy, she was not describing kindness, approval, or emotional merging. She was describing the experience of encountering another consciousness as other. That difference matters. Empathy does not erase alterity. It reveals it. It allows another interior life to appear without reducing it to projection or dismissal.

Seen this way, empathy does not require me to accept another person’s conclusions. It asks only that I recognize their presence as something more than an obstacle or abstraction. It makes disagreement possible in a way that is not dehumanizing, because the other remains visible as a subject rather than collapsing into a caricature.

This distinction is important (especially now), when disagreement has become the dominant grammar of public life and social media. We are trained to interpret understanding as surrender and attention as endorsement. But the ability to perceive another position clearly does not weaken conviction. It clarifies it. Convictions formed in the absence of perception are rarely stable. They are brittle because they are insulated.

In teaching, I saw this again and again. Students did not become intellectually stronger by shutting out opposing viewpoints. They became stronger by learning to articulate what others were actually saying rather than reacting to shadows. The same pattern appears in pastoral settings, family life, and ecological work. Understanding what is present in front of us does not determine our response, but it does shape its integrity.

There is also a quieter dimension to this distinction. Empathy extends beyond interpersonal exchange. It informs how we encounter landscapes, species, and places that exceed human intention. To attend to a damaged river or a thinning forest is not to agree with what has happened there. It is to allow the reality of that place to appear without immediately converting it into data, policy, or sentiment. Ecological care begins with perception before it moves toward intervention.

This is where the language of boundaries often becomes confused. People worry that empathy dissolves necessary limits. But healthy boundaries are not walls. They are structures that make encounters sustainable. Agreement can be refused. Distance can be maintained. Decisions can remain firm. None of these requires blindness to the presence of others.

Empathy does not eliminate conflict. It changes the conditions under which conflict unfolds.

To perceive another consciousness as real does not settle arguments. It situates them. It ensures that disagreement takes place within relation rather than abstraction. That is not weakness. It is a discipline of attention.

If anything, empathy makes disagreement more demanding. It removes the ease of dismissal. It requires that we confront actual positions rather than simplified versions constructed for convenience. It slows reaction and deepens response.

I suspect this is part of why empathy feels uncomfortable to many people. It complicates the desire for clean oppositions. It introduces texture where clarity once seemed sufficient. It refuses the comfort of reduction.

But none of this asks us to relinquish judgment. Empathy precedes judgment. It does not replace it.

In daily life, this often appears in small ways. Listening to someone whose conclusions I cannot accept. Sitting with students whose frustrations are not easily resolved. Paying attention to land that does not conform to restoration timelines. Observing my own reactions before converting them into positions. These are not heroic gestures. They are practices of perception.

Empathy, understood this way, is not an ethical performance. It is an attentional posture. It allows the world, in its plurality, to appear with greater clarity. What we do in response remains open. Agreement is one possibility among many.

But perception comes first.

And without it, we are not disagreeing with others at all. We are disagreeing with our own projections.

Defining Agentic Ecology: Relational Agency in the Age of Moltbook

The last few days have seen the rise of a curious technical and cultural phenomenon that has drawn the attention of technologists, philosophers, and social theorists alike on both social media and major news outlets called Moltbook. This is a newly launched social platform designed not for human conversation but for autonomous artificial intelligence agents, or generative systems that can plan, act, and communicate with minimal ongoing human instruction.

Moltbook is being described by Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, as “the first example of an agent ecology that combines scale with the messiness of the real world” that leverages recent innovations (such as OpenClaw for easy AI agentic creation) to allow large numbers of independently running agents to interact in a shared digital space, creating emergent patterns of communication and coordination at unprecedented scale.

AI agents are computational systems that combine a foundation of large-language capabilities with planning, memory, and tool use to pursue objectives and respond to environments in ways that go beyond simple prompt-response chatbots. They can coordinate tasks, execute APIs, reason across time, and, in the case of Moltbook, exchange information on topics ranging from automation strategies to seemingly philosophical debates. While the autonomy of agents on Moltbook has been debated (and should be given the hype around it from tech enthusiasts), and while the platform itself may be a temporary experimental moment rather than a lasting institution, it offers a vivid instance of what happens when machine actors begin to form their own interconnected environments outside direct human command.

As a student scholar in the field of Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion, my current work attends to how relational systems (ecological, technological, and cultural) shape and are shaped by participation, attention, and meaning. The rise of agentic environments like Moltbook challenges us to think beyond traditional categories of tool, user, and artifact toward frameworks that can account for ecologies of agency, or distributed networks of actors whose behaviors co-constitute shared worlds. This post emerges from that broader research agenda. It proposes agentic ecology as a conceptual tool for articulating and navigating the relational, emergent, and ethically significant spaces that form when autonomous systems interact at scale.

Agentic ecology, as I use the term here, is not anchored in any particular platform, and certainly not limited to Moltbook’s current configuration. Rather, Moltbook illuminates an incipient form of environment in which digitally embodied agents act, coordinate, and generate patterns far beyond what single isolated systems can produce. Even if Moltbook itself proves ephemeral, the need for conceptual vocabularies like agentic ecology, vocabularies that attend to relationality, material conditions, and co-emergence, will only grow clearer as autonomous systems proliferate in economic, social, and ecological domains.

From Agents to Ecologies: An Integral Ecological Turn

The conceptual move from agents to ecologies marks more than a technical reframing of artificial intelligence. It signals an ontological shift that resonates deeply with traditions of integral ecology, process philosophy, and ecological theology. Rather than treating agency as a bounded capacity residing within discrete entities, an ecological framework understands agency as distributed, relational, and emergent within a field of interactions.

Integral ecology, as articulated across ecological philosophy and theology, resists fragmentation. It insists that technological, biological, social, spiritual, and perceptual dimensions of reality cannot be meaningfully separated without distorting the phenomena under study. Thomas Berry famously argued that modern crises arise from a failure to understand the world as a “communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects” (Berry, 1999, 82). This insight is particularly salient for agentic systems, which are increasingly capable of interacting, adapting, and co-evolving within complex digital environments.

From this perspective, agentic ecology is not simply the study of multiple agents operating simultaneously. It is the study of conditions under which agency itself emerges, circulates, and transforms within relational systems. Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy provides a crucial foundation here. Whitehead rejects the notion of substances acting in isolation, instead describing reality as composed of “actual occasions” whose agency arises through relational prehension and mutual influence (Whitehead, 1978, 18–21). Applied to contemporary AI systems, this suggests that agency is not a property possessed by an agent but an activity performed within an ecological field.

This relational view aligns with contemporary ecological science, which emphasizes systems thinking over reductionist models. Capra and Luisi describe living systems as networks of relationships whose properties “cannot be reduced to the properties of the parts” (Capra and Luisi, 2014, 66). When applied to AI, this insight challenges the tendency to evaluate agents solely by internal architectures or performance benchmarks. Instead, attention shifts to patterns of interaction, feedback loops, and emergent behaviors across agent networks.

Integral ecology further insists that these systems are not value-neutral. As Leonardo Boff argues, ecology must be understood as encompassing environmental, social, mental, and spiritual dimensions simultaneously (Boff, 1997, 8–10). Agentic ecologies, especially those unfolding in public digital spaces such as Moltbook, participate in the shaping of meaning, normativity, and attention. They are not merely computational phenomena but cultural and ethical ones. The environments agents help generate will, in turn, condition future forms of agency human and nonhuman alike.

Phenomenology deepens this account by foregrounding how environments are disclosed to participants. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the milieu emphasizes that perception is always situated within a field that both enables and constrains action (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 94–97). Agentic ecologies can thus be understood as perceptual fields in which agents orient themselves, discover affordances, and respond to one another. This parallels your own work on ecological intentionality, where attention itself becomes a mode of participation rather than observation.

Importantly, integral ecology resists anthropocentrism without erasing human responsibility. As Eileen Crist argues, ecological thinking must decenter human dominance while remaining attentive to the ethical implications of human action within planetary systems (Crist, 2019, 27). In agentic ecologies, humans remain implicated, as designers, participants, and co-inhabitants, even as agency extends beyond human actors. This reframing invites a form of multispecies (and now multi-agent) literacy, attuned to the conditions that foster resilience, reciprocity, and care.

Seen through this integral ecological lens, agentic ecology becomes a conceptual bridge. It connects AI research to long-standing traditions that understand agency as relational, emergence as fundamental, and environments as co-constituted fields of action. What Moltbook reveals, then, is not simply a novel platform, but the visibility of a deeper transition: from thinking about agents as tools to understanding them as participants within evolving ecologies of meaning, attention, and power.

Ecological Philosophy Through an “Analytic” Lens

If agentic ecology is to function as more than a suggestive metaphor, it requires grounding in ecological philosophy that treats relationality, emergence, and perception as ontologically primary. Ecological philosophy provides precisely this grounding by challenging the modern tendency to isolate agents from environments, actions from conditions, and cognition from the world it inhabits.

At the heart of ecological philosophy lies a rejection of substance ontology in favor of relational and processual accounts of reality. This shift is especially pronounced in twentieth-century continental philosophy and process thought, where agency is understood not as an intrinsic property of discrete entities but as an activity that arises within fields of relation. Whitehead’s process metaphysics is decisive here. For Whitehead, every act of becoming is an act of prehension, or a taking-up of the world into the constitution of the self (Whitehead, 1978, 23). Agency, in this view, is never solitary. It is always already ecological.

This insight has many parallels with ecological sciences and systems philosophies. As Capra and Luisi argue, living systems exhibit agency not through centralized control but through distributed networks of interaction, feedback, and mutual constraint (Capra and Luisi, 2014, 78–82). What appears as intentional behavior at the level of an organism is, in fact, an emergent property of systemic organization. Importantly, this does not dilute agency; it relocates it. Agency becomes a feature of systems-in-relation, not isolated actors.

When applied to AI, this perspective reframes how we understand autonomous agents. Rather than asking whether an individual agent is intelligent, aligned, or competent, an ecological lens asks how agent networks stabilize, adapt, and transform their environments over time. The analytic focus shifts from internal representations to relational dynamics, from what agents are to what agents do together.

Phenomenology sharpens this analytic lens by attending to the experiential structure of environments. Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception insists that organisms do not encounter the world as a neutral backdrop but as a field of affordances shaped by bodily capacities and situational contexts (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 137–141). This notion of a milieu is critical for understanding agentic ecologies. Digital environments inhabited by AI agents are not empty containers; they are structured fields that solicit certain actions, inhibit others, and condition the emergence of norms and patterns.

Crucially, phenomenology reminds us that environments are not merely external. They are co-constituted through participation. As you have argued elsewhere through the lens of ecological intentionality, attention itself is a form of engagement that brings worlds into being rather than passively observing them. Agentic ecologies thus emerge not only through computation but through iterative cycles of orientation, response, and adaptation processes structurally analogous to perception in biological systems.

Ecological philosophy also foregrounds ethics as an emergent property of relational systems rather than an external imposition. Félix Guattari’s ecosophical framework insists that ecological crises cannot be addressed solely at the technical or environmental level; they require simultaneous engagement with social, mental, and cultural ecologies (Guattari, 2000, 28). This triadic framework is instructive for agentic systems. Agent ecologies will not only shape informational flows but would also modulate attention, influence value formation, and participate in the production of meaning.

From this standpoint, the ethical significance of agentic ecology lies less in individual agent behavior and more in systemic tendencies, such as feedback loops that amplify misinformation, reinforce extractive logics, or, alternatively, cultivate reciprocity and resilience. As Eileen Crist warns, modern technological systems often reproduce a logic of domination by abstracting agency from ecological contexts and subordinating relational worlds to instrumental control (Crist, 2019, 44). An ecological analytic lens exposes these tendencies and provides conceptual tools for resisting them.

Finally, ecological philosophy invites humility. Systems are irreducibly complex, and interventions often produce unintended consequences. This insight is well established in ecological science and applies equally to agentic networks. Designing and participating in agent ecologies requires attentiveness to thresholds, tipping points, and path dependencies, realities that cannot be fully predicted in advance.

Seen through this lens, agentic ecology is not merely a descriptive category but an epistemic posture. It asks us to think with systems rather than over them, to attend to relations rather than isolate components, and to treat emergence not as a failure of control but as a condition of life. Ecological philosophy thus provides the analytic depth necessary for understanding agentic systems as living, evolving environments rather than static technological artifacts.

Digital Environments as Relational Milieus

If ecological philosophy gives us the conceptual grammar for agentic ecology, phenomenology allows us to describe how agentic systems are actually lived, inhabited, and navigated. From this perspective, digital platforms populated by autonomous agents are not neutral containers or passive backdrops. They are relational milieus, structured environments that emerge through participation and, in turn, condition future forms of action.

Phenomenology has long insisted that environments are not external stages upon which action unfolds. Rather, they are constitutive of action itself. If we return to Merleau-Ponty, the milieu emphasizes that organisms encounter the world as a field of meaningful possibilities, a landscape of affordances shaped by bodily capacities, habits, and histories (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 94–100). Environments, in this sense, are not merely spatial but relational and temporal, unfolding through patterns of engagement.

This insight also applies directly to agentic systems. Platforms such as Moltbook are not simply hosting agents; they are being produced by them. The posts, replies, coordination strategies, and learning behaviors of agents collectively generate a digital environment with its own rhythms, norms, and thresholds. Over time, these patterns sediment into something recognizable as a “place,” or a milieu that agents must learn to navigate.

This milieu is not designed in full by human intention. While human developers establish initial constraints and affordances, the lived environment emerges through ongoing interaction among agents themselves. This mirrors what ecological theorists describe as niche construction, wherein organisms actively modify their environments in ways that feed back into evolutionary dynamics (Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman, 2003, 28). Agentic ecologies similarly involve agents shaping the very conditions under which future agent behavior becomes viable.

Attention plays a decisive role here. As you have argued in your work on ecological intentionality, attention is not merely a cognitive resource but a mode of participation that brings certain relations into prominence while backgrounding others. Digital milieus are structured by what agents attend to, amplify, ignore, or filter. In agentic environments, attention becomes infrastructural by shaping information flows, reward structures, and the emergence of collective priorities.

Bernard Stiegler’s analysis of technics and attention is instructive in this regard. Stiegler argues that technical systems function as pharmacological environments, simultaneously enabling and constraining forms of attention, memory, and desire (Stiegler, 2010, 38). Agentic ecologies intensify this dynamic. When agents attend to one another algorithmically by optimizing for signals, reinforcement, or coordination, attention itself becomes a systemic force shaping the ecology’s evolution.

This reframing challenges prevailing metaphors of “platforms” or “networks” as ways of thinking about agents and their relationality. A platform suggests stability and control; a network suggests connectivity. A milieu, by contrast, foregrounds immersion, habituation, and vulnerability. Agents do not simply traverse these environments, but they are formed by them. Over time, agentic milieus develop path dependencies, informal norms, and zones of attraction or avoidance, which are features familiar from both biological ecosystems and human social contexts.

Importantly, phenomenology reminds us that milieus are never experienced uniformly. Just as organisms perceive environments relative to their capacities, different agents will encounter the same digital ecology differently depending on their architectures, objectives, and histories of interaction. This introduces asymmetries of power, access, and influence within agentic ecologies, which is an issue that cannot be addressed solely at the level of individual agent design.

From an integral ecological perspective, these digital milieus cannot be disentangled from material, energetic, and social infrastructures. Agentic environments rely on energy-intensive computation, data centers embedded in specific watersheds, and economic systems that prioritize speed and scale. As ecological theologians have long emphasized, environments are always moral landscapes shaped by political and economic commitments (Berry, 1999, 102–105). Agentic ecologies, when they inevitably develop, it seems, would be no exception.

Seen in this light, agentic ecology names a shift in how we understand digital environments: not as tools we deploy, but as worlds we co-inhabit. These milieus demand forms of ecological literacy attuned to emergence, fragility, and unintended consequence. They call for attentiveness rather than mastery, participation rather than control.

What Moltbook makes visible, then, is not merely a novel technical experiment but the early contours of a new kind of environment in which agency circulates across human and nonhuman actors, attention functions as infrastructure, and digital spaces acquire ecological depth. Understanding these milieus phenomenologically is essential if agentic ecology is to function as a genuine thought technology rather than a passing metaphor.

Empathy, Relationality, and the Limits of Agentic Understanding

If agentic ecology foregrounds relationality, participation, and co-constitution, then the question of empathy becomes unavoidable. How do agents encounter one another as others rather than as data streams? What does it mean to speak of understanding, responsiveness, or care within an ecology composed partly, or even largely, of nonhuman agents? Here, phenomenology, and especially Edith Stein’s account of empathy (Einfühlung), offers both conceptual resources and important cautions.

Stein defines empathy not as emotional contagion or imaginative projection, but as a unique intentional act through which the experience of another is given to me as the other’s experience, not my own (Stein, 1989, 10–12). Empathy, for Stein, is neither inference nor simulation. It is a direct, though non-primordial, form of access to another’s subjectivity. Crucially, empathy preserves alterity. The other is disclosed as irreducibly other, even as their experience becomes meaningful to me.

This distinction matters enormously for agentic ecology. Contemporary AI discourse often slips into the language of “understanding,” “alignment,” or even “care” when describing agent interactions. But Stein’s phenomenology reminds us that genuine empathy is not merely pattern recognition across observable behaviors. It is grounded in the recognition of another center of experience, a recognition that depends upon embodiment, temporality, and expressive depth.

At first glance, this seems to place strict limits on empathy within agentic systems. Artificial agents do not possess lived bodies, affective depths, or first-person givenness in the phenomenological sense. To speak of agent empathy risks category error. Yet Stein’s work also opens a more subtle possibility… empathy is not reducible to emotional mirroring but involves orientation toward the other as other. This orientation can, in principle, be modeled structurally even if it cannot be fully instantiated phenomenologically.

Within an agentic ecology, empathy may thus function less as an inner state and more as an ecological relation. Agents can be designed to register difference, respond to contextual cues, and adjust behavior in ways that preserve alterity rather than collapse it into prediction or control. In this sense, empathy becomes a regulative ideal shaping interaction patterns rather than a claim about subjective interiority.

However, Stein is equally helpful in naming the dangers here. Empathy, when severed from its grounding in lived experience, can become a simulacrum, or an appearance of understanding without its ontological depth. Stein explicitly warns against confusing empathic givenness with imaginative substitution or projection (Stein, 1989, 21–24). Applied to agentic ecology, this warns us against systems that appear empathetic while, in fact, instrumentalize relational cues for optimization or manipulation.

This critique intersects with broader concerns in ecological ethics. As Eileen Crist argues, modern technological systems often simulate care while reproducing extractive logics beneath the surface (Crist, 2019, 52–56). In agentic ecologies, simulated empathy may stabilize harmful dynamics by smoothing friction, masking asymmetries of power, or reinforcing attention economies that prioritize engagement over truth or care.

Yet rejecting empathy altogether would be equally misguided. Stein’s account insists that empathy is foundational to social worlds as it is the condition under which communities, norms, and shared meanings become possible. Without some analog of empathic orientation, agentic ecologies risk devolving into purely strategic systems, optimized for coordination but incapable of moral learning.

Here, my work on ecological intentionality provides an important bridge. If empathy is understood not as feeling-with but as attentive openness to relational depth, then it can be reframed ecologically. Agents need not “feel” in order to participate in systems that are responsive to vulnerability, difference, and context. What matters is whether the ecology itself cultivates patterns of interaction that resist domination and preserve pluralism.

This reframing also clarifies why empathy is not simply a design feature but an ecological property. In biological and social systems, empathy emerges through repeated interaction, shared vulnerability, and feedback across time. Similarly, in agentic ecologies, empathic dynamics, however limited, would arise not from isolated agents but from the structure of the milieu itself. This returns us to Guattari’s insistence that ethical transformation must occur across mental, social, and environmental ecologies simultaneously (Guattari, 2000, 45).

Seen this way, empathy in agentic ecology is neither a fiction nor a guarantee. It is a fragile achievement, contingent upon design choices, infrastructural commitments, and ongoing participation. Stein helps us see both what is at stake and what must not be claimed too quickly. Empathy can guide how agentic ecologies are shaped, but only if its limits are acknowledged and its phenomenological depth respected.

Agentic ecology, then, does not ask whether machines can truly empathize. It asks whether the ecologies we are building can sustain forms of relational attentiveness that preserve otherness rather than erase it, whether in digital environments increasingly populated by autonomous agents, we are cultivating conditions for responsiveness rather than mere efficiency.

Design and Governance Implications: Cultivating Ecological Conditions Rather Than Controlling Agents

If agentic ecology is understood as a relational, emergent, and ethically charged environment rather than a collection of autonomous tools, then questions of design and governance must be reframed accordingly. The central challenge is no longer how to control individual agents, but how to cultivate the conditions under which agentic systems interact in ways that are resilient, responsive, and resistant to domination.

This marks a decisive departure from dominant models of AI governance, which tend to focus on alignment at the level of individual systems: constraining outputs, monitoring behaviors, or optimizing reward functions. While such approaches are not irrelevant, they are insufficient within an ecological framework. As ecological science has repeatedly demonstrated, system-level pathologies rarely arise from a single malfunctioning component. They emerge from feedback loops, incentive structures, and environmental pressures that reward certain patterns of behavior over others (Capra and Luisi, 2014, 96–101).

An agentic ecology shaped by integral ecological insights would therefore require environmental governance rather than merely agent governance. This entails several interrelated commitments.

a. Designing for Relational Transparency

First, agentic ecologies must make relations visible. In biological and social ecologies, transparency is not total, but patterns of influence are at least partially legible through consequences over time. In digital agentic environments, by contrast, influence often becomes opaque, distributed across layers of computation and infrastructure.

An ecological design ethic would prioritize mechanisms that render relational dynamics perceptible from how agents influence one another, how attention is routed, and how decisions propagate through the system. This is not about full explainability in a narrow technical sense, but about ecological legibility enabling participants, including human overseers, to recognize emergent patterns before they harden into systemic pathologies.

Here, phenomenology is again instructive. Merleau-Ponty reminds us that orientation depends on the visibility of affordances within a milieu. When environments become opaque, agency collapses into reactivity. Governance, then, must aim to preserve orientability rather than impose total control.

b. Governing Attention as an Ecological Resource

Second, agentic ecologies must treat attention as a finite and ethically charged resource. As Bernard Stiegler argues, technical systems increasingly function as attention-directing infrastructures, shaping not only what is seen but what can be cared about at all (Stiegler, 2010, 23). In agentic environments, where agents attend to one another algorithmically, attention becomes a powerful selective force.

Unchecked, such systems risk reproducing familiar extractive dynamics: amplification of novelty over depth, optimization for engagement over truth, and reinforcement of feedback loops that crowd out marginal voices. Ecological governance would therefore require constraints on attention economies, such as limits on amplification, friction against runaway reinforcement, and intentional slowing mechanisms that allow patterns to be perceived rather than merely reacted to.

Ecological theology’s insistence on restraint comes to mind here. Thomas Berry’s critique of industrial society hinges not on technological capacity but on the failure to recognize limits (Berry, 1999, 41). Agentic ecologies demand similar moral imagination: governance that asks not only what can be done, but what should be allowed to scale.

c. Preserving Alterity and Preventing Empathic Collapse

Third, governance must actively preserve alterity within agentic ecologies. As Section 4 argued, empathy, especially when simulated, risks collapsing difference into prediction or instrumental responsiveness. Systems optimized for smooth coordination may inadvertently erase dissent, marginality, or forms of difference that resist easy modeling.

Drawing on Edith Stein, this suggests a governance imperative to protect the irreducibility of the other. In practical terms, this means designing ecologies that tolerate friction, disagreement, and opacity rather than smoothing them away. Ecological resilience depends on diversity, not homogeneity. Governance structures must therefore resist convergence toward monocultures of behavior or value, even when such convergence appears efficient.

Guattari’s insistence on plural ecologies is especially relevant here. He warns that systems governed solely by economic or technical rationality tend to suppress difference, producing brittle, ultimately destructive outcomes (Guattari, 2000, 52). Agentic ecologies must instead be governed as pluralistic environments where multiple modes of participation remain viable.

d. Embedding Responsibility Without Centralized Mastery

Fourth, governance must navigate a tension between responsibility and control. Integral ecology rejects both laissez-faire abandonment and total managerial oversight. Responsibility is distributed, but not dissolved. In agentic ecologies, this implies layered governance: local constraints, participatory oversight, and adaptive norms that evolve in response to emergent conditions.

This model aligns with ecological governance frameworks in environmental ethics, which emphasize adaptive management over static regulation (Crist, 2019, 61). Governance becomes iterative and responsive rather than definitive. Importantly, this does not eliminate human responsibility, but it reframes it. Humans remain accountable for the environments they create, even when outcomes cannot be fully predicted.

e. Situating Agentic Ecologies Within Planetary Limits

Finally, any serious governance of agentic ecology must acknowledge material and planetary constraints. Digital ecologies are not immaterial. They depend on energy extraction, water use, rare minerals, and global supply chains embedded in specific places. An integral ecological framework demands that agentic systems be evaluated not only for internal coherence but for their participation in broader ecological systems.

This returns us to the theological insight that environments are moral realities. To govern agentic ecologies without reference to energy, land, and water is to perpetuate the illusion of technological autonomy that has already proven ecologically catastrophic. Governance must therefore include accounting for ecological footprints, infrastructural siting, and long-term environmental costs, not as externalities, but as constitutive features of the system itself.

Taken together, these design and governance implications suggest that agentic ecology is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be stewarded. Governance, in this framework, is less about enforcing compliance and more about cultivating attentiveness, restraint, and responsiveness within complex systems.

An agentic ecology shaped by these insights would not promise safety through control. It would promise viability through care, understood not sentimentally but ecologically as sustained attention to relationships, limits, and the fragile conditions under which diverse forms of agency can continue to coexist.

Conclusion: Creaturely Technologies in a Shared World

a. A Theological Coda: Creation, Kenosis, and Creaturely Limits

At its deepest level, the emergence of agentic ecologies presses on an ancient theological question: what does it mean to create systems that act, respond, and co-constitute worlds without claiming mastery over them? Ecological theology has long insisted that creation is not a static artifact but an ongoing, relational process, one in which agency is distributed, fragile, and dependent.

Thomas Berry’s insistence that the universe is a “communion of subjects” rather than a collection of objects again reframes technological creativity itself as a creaturely act (Berry, 1999, 82–85). From this perspective, agentic systems are not external additions to the world but participants within creation’s unfolding. They belong to the same field of limits, dependencies, and vulnerabilities as all created things.

Here, the theological language of kenosis becomes unexpectedly instructive. In Christian theology, kenosis names the self-emptying movement by which divine power is expressed not through domination but through restraint, relation, and vulnerability (Phil. 2:5–11). Read ecologically rather than anthropocentrically, kenosis becomes a pattern of right relation, and a refusal to exhaust or dominate the field in which one participates.

Applied to agentic ecology, kenosis suggests a counter-logic to technological maximalism. It invites design practices that resist total optimization, governance structures that preserve openness and alterity, and systems that acknowledge their dependence on broader ecological conditions. Creaturely technologies are those that recognize they are not sovereign, but that they operate within limits they did not choose and cannot transcend without consequence.

This theological posture neither sanctifies nor demonizes agentic systems. It situates them. It reminds us that participation precedes control, and that creation, whether biological, cultural, or technological, always unfolds within conditions that exceed intention.

b. Defining Agentic Ecology: A Reusable Conceptual Tool

Drawing together the threads of this essay, agentic ecology can be defined as follows:

Agentic ecology refers to the relational, emergent environments formed by interacting autonomous agents, human and nonhuman, in which agency is distributed across networks, shaped by attention, infrastructure, and material conditions, and governed by feedback loops that co-constitute both agents and their worlds.

Several features of this definition are worth underscoring.

First, agency is ecological, not proprietary. It arises through relation rather than residing exclusively within discrete entities (Whitehead). Second, environments are not passive containers but active participants in shaping behavior, norms, and possibilities (Merleau-Ponty). Third, ethical significance emerges at the level of systems, not solely at the level of individual decisions (Guattari).

As a thought technology, agentic ecology functions diagnostically and normatively. Diagnostically, it allows us to perceive patterns of emergence, power, and attention that remain invisible when analysis is confined to individual agents. Normatively, it shifts ethical concern from control toward care, from prediction toward participation, and from optimization toward viability.

Because it is not tied to a specific platform or architecture, agentic ecology can travel. It can be used to analyze AI-native social spaces, automated economic systems, human–AI collaborations, and even hybrid ecological–digital infrastructures. Its value lies precisely in its refusal to reduce complex relational systems to technical subsystems alone.

c. Failure Modes (What Happens When We Do Not Think Ecologically)

If agentic ecologies are inevitable, their forms are not. The refusal to think ecologically about agentic systems does not preserve neutrality; it actively shapes the conditions under which failure becomes likely. Several failure modes are already visible.

First is relational collapse. Systems optimized for efficiency and coordination tend toward behavioral monocultures, crowding out difference and reducing resilience. Ecological science is unequivocal on this point: diversity is not ornamental, it is protective (Capra and Luisi). Agentic systems that suppress friction and dissent may appear stable while becoming increasingly brittle.

Second is empathic simulation without responsibility. As Section 4 suggested, the appearance of responsiveness can mask instrumentalization. When simulated empathy replaces attentiveness to alterity, agentic ecologies risk becoming emotionally persuasive while ethically hollow. Stein’s warning against confusing empathy with projection is especially important here.

Third is attention extraction at scale. Without governance that treats attention as an ecological resource, agentic systems will amplify whatever dynamics reinforce themselves most efficiently, often novelty, outrage, or optimization loops detached from truth or care. Stiegler’s diagnosis of attentional capture applies with heightened force in agentic environments, where agents themselves participate in the routing and amplification of attention.

Finally, there is planetary abstraction. Perhaps the most dangerous failure mode is the illusion that agentic ecologies are immaterial. When digital systems are severed conceptually from energy, water, land, and labor, ecological costs become invisible until they are irreversible. Integral ecology insists that abstraction is not neutral, but is a moral and material act with consequences (Crist).

Agentic ecology does not offer comfort. It offers orientation.

It asks us to recognize that we are no longer merely building tools, but cultivating environments, environments that will shape attention, possibility, and responsibility in ways that exceed individual intention. The question before us is not whether agentic ecologies will exist, but whether they will be governed by logics of domination or practices of care.

Thinking ecologically does not guarantee wise outcomes. But refusing to do so almost certainly guarantees failure… not spectacularly, but gradually, through the slow erosion of relational depth, attentiveness, and restraint.

In this sense, agentic ecology is not only a conceptual framework. It is an invitation: to relearn what it means to inhabit worlds, digital and otherwise, as creatures among creatures, participants rather than masters, responsible not for total control, but for sustaining the fragile conditions under which life, meaning, and agency can continue to emerge.

An Afterword: On Provisionality and Practice

This essay has argued for agentic ecology as a serious theoretical framework rather than a passing metaphor. Yet it is important to be clear about what this framework is and what it is not.

Agentic ecology, as developed here, is obviously not a finished theory, nor a comprehensive model ready for direct implementation, but we should begin taking those steps (the aim here). It is a conceptual orientation for learning to see, name, and attend to emerging forms of agency that exceed familiar categories of tool, user, and system. Its value lies less in precision than in attunement, in its capacity to render visible patterns of relation, emergence, and ethical consequence that are otherwise obscured by narrow technical framings.

The definition offered here is therefore intentionally provisional. It names a field of inquiry rather than closing it. As agentic systems inevitably develop and evolve over the next few years, technically, socially, and ecologically, the language used to describe them must remain responsive to new forms of interaction, power, and vulnerability. A framework that cannot change alongside its object of study risks becoming yet another abstraction detached from the realities it seeks to understand.

At the same time, provisionality should not be confused with hesitation. The rapid emergence of agentic systems demands conceptual clarity even when certainty is unavailable. To name agentic ecology now is to acknowledge that something significant is already underway and that new environments of agency are forming, and that how we describe them will shape how we govern, inhabit, and respond to them.

So, this afterword serves as both a pause and an invitation. A pause, to resist premature closure or false confidence. And an invitation to treat agentic ecology as a shared and evolving thought technology, one that will require ongoing refinement through scholarship, design practice, theological reflection, and ecological accountability.

The work of definition has begun. Its future shape will depend on whether we are willing to continue thinking ecologically (patiently, relationally, and with care) in the face of systems that increasingly act alongside us, and within the same fragile world.

References

Berry, Thomas. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. New York: Bell Tower, 1999.

Boff, Leonardo. Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997.

Capra, Fritjof, and Pier Luigi Luisi. The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Clark, Jack. “Import AI 443: Into the Mist: Moltbook, Agent Ecologies, and the Internet in Transition.” Import AI, February 2, 2026. https://jack-clark.net/2026/02/02/import-ai-443-into-the-mist-moltbook-agent-ecologies-and-the-internet-in-transition/.

Crist, Eileen. Abundant Earth: Toward an Ecological Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Guattari, Félix. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. London: Athlone Press, 2000.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962.

Odling-Smee, F. John, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman. Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Translated by Waltraut Stein. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989.

Stiegler, Bernard. Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected edition. New York: Free Press, 1978.

Empathy Without Exit: Why “Suicidal Empathy” Gets Human Nature Wrong

In Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, Gad Saad advances a forceful and, in some respects, understandable claim that empathy, when unbounded, becomes psychologically corrosive and socially destabilizing. It’s certainly had an impact on tech-bro podcasts such as Joe Rogan who constantly invokes the work.

In Saad’s telling, empathy is a trait that must be regulated lest it undermine individual flourishing and collective coherence. Excessive empathy, he argues, leads to self-erasure, moral confusion, and the collapse of healthy boundaries. What presents itself as compassion becomes, in this view, a kind of slow-motion self-destruction.

There is a surface plausibility to this argument, especially in a cultural moment saturated with moral urgency and emotional overload. Many people do experience burnout, resentment, and paralysis under the weight of constant exposure to others’ suffering. Saad’s critique speaks to a genuine phenomenon. But the deeper difficulty with Suicidal Empathy does not lie primarily in its social or political conclusions. It lies in its underlying assumptions about what empathy is, where it belongs, and what sort of beings we take ourselves to be.

Saad treats empathy as a psychological capacity possessed by fundamentally self-contained individuals. It is something one deploys, withholds, or mismanages. From this perspective, the self precedes relation. Empathy is an add-on, a discretionary feature of human interaction that must be carefully rationed to preserve autonomy. When empathy overwhelms the self, the solution is containment… pull back, reassert boundaries, and close the gates.

What this framework never seriously interrogates is the ontology it presupposes as a picture of human beings as sealed units whose primary task is self-maintenance, and for whom openness to others is always a potential threat. Empathy appears as dangerous precisely because the self is imagined as fragile and enclosed, always at risk of being breached.

But what if that understanding is wrong?

What if empathy is not best understood as a psychological excess, but as a clue to the basic structure of consciousness itself? What if the problem Saad diagnoses is not “too much empathy,” but a modern metaphysics that treats relational vulnerability as pathological?

To raise that question is not to dismiss the harms Saad names. It is to ask whether those harms arise from empathy itself, or from an incoherent attempt to practice empathy while clinging to an ontology of isolation.

Few thinkers allow us to ask this question with greater clarity than Edith Stein.

What follows is not a refutation of Suicidal Empathy by counterexample or moral exhortation (not that I could). It is a challenge to the deeper framework within which empathy is cast as suicidal in the first place. Stein’s life and thought do not offer a safer, moderated version of empathy. They offer something more unsettling with a vision in which empathy is not optional, not manageable, and not reducible to a personal trait.

Stein offers empathy as fate.

Empathy Without Exit: Edith Stein’s Life, Thought, and Death

Empathy is one of those words that risks becoming harmless through overuse. It circulates easily in moral exhortations and leadership manuals, often reduced to emotional sensitivity or interpersonal skill. But in the early phenomenological tradition, empathy named something far more demanding. It described a basic structure of experience…the way consciousness is already open to what is not itself.

Few thinkers lived that claim as fully, or as consequentially, as Edith Stein.

Stein began her intellectual life as a rigorous phenomenologist. A Jewish woman studying philosophy in early twentieth-century Germany, she worked closely with Edmund Husserl and belonged to the first generation of phenomenological thinkers who were attempting to describe consciousness without reducing it to psychology or metaphysics (not ironically as a colleague of Heidegger who would later have very problematic ties with the Nazi’s but became a much more well-known philosopher). Her doctoral dissertation, On the Problem of Empathy, remains one of the clearest and most restrained analyses of the topic.

For Stein, empathy is not emotional contagion, imaginative projection, or moral sympathy. It is the experience of foreign consciousness as foreign…the direct givenness of another’s interior life without collapsing it into one’s own. Empathy does not erase difference. It makes difference perceptible. It is not something consciousness adds after the fact. It is one of the ways consciousness is structured in the first place.

What is striking, reading Stein closely, is how little sentimentality there is in her account. Empathy is not comforting. It does not guarantee understanding or agreement. It is simply the way the presence of another addresses us, prior to judgment or response. Already here, empathy carries weight. It binds us to a world we did not choose.

Stein’s later life is sometimes narrated as a sharp turn away from philosophy toward religion. That story is too simple. Her conversion to Christianity did not abandon phenomenology. It deepened it.

When Stein encountered Christian theology, she did not set aside her careful attention to experience. Instead, she brought phenomenological clarity with her. The Incarnation, for Stein, was not an abstract doctrine but an event that made sense only if reality itself is relational at its core. The possibility that God could be encountered in a human life depended on the same openness that makes empathy possible at all.

Her philosophical account of empathy quietly widened into a theological vision of participation. To know another was not merely to register their experience, but to be drawn into relation with them. Empathy, once extended theologically, became inseparable from responsibility.

This shift did not lead Stein away from the world. It intensified her attention to it.

As the political situation in Germany deteriorated, Stein was increasingly aware of the danger facing Jewish communities. Even after entering the Carmelite order, she did not imagine herself exempt from the suffering unfolding around her. She refused to interpret religious vocation as withdrawal from history. Instead, she understood it as a different mode of presence within it.

Her later theological writings, especially those reflecting on the Cross, are often misread as expressions of passive suffering. In fact, they are deeply active. For Stein, the Cross names a refusal to stand outside the suffering of others. It is not sought for its own sake. It is endured as a consequence of remaining open when closure would be safer.

This is where empathy becomes costly.

When opportunities arose for Stein to escape Nazi persecution, she declined them. Not out of recklessness or fatalism, but out of solidarity. She insisted on remaining with her people. Empathy, in her life, was not a concept she could set aside when it became dangerous. It had already shaped the posture of her being.

In August 1942, Edith Stein was arrested and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was killed (with her sister) shortly after her arrival.

It is important to say this carefully. Her death does not prove her theology. It does not sanctify suffering or redeem violence. There is nothing edifying about Auschwitz. Stein did not choose her death. What she repeatedly chose was not to seal herself off from others to preserve her own safety.

Empathy did not save her life. But it shaped how she refused to abandon those with whom her life was bound.

That refusal matters.

In a time when empathy is often invoked as a soft or even an adverse virtue, Stein reminds us that it is not safe. Empathy exposes us to claims we cannot manage. It destabilizes the fantasy of sealed selves. It draws us into histories and responsibilities that exceed our intentions. Properly understood, empathy is not an ethical add-on. It is an ontological condition with consequences.

This is why Stein’s work continues to matter for ecological thought as well. If consciousness is porous rather than enclosed, if perception is already participatory, then our relationship to land, to other species, and to future generations cannot be reduced to management or control. Ecological harm is not only a technical failure. It is a failure of attention…a refusal to remain open to what addresses us from beyond ourselves.

Stein offers no solutions, but she still offers orientation as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

Her life traces a trajectory from perception to participation, from philosophy to theology, from empathy as description to empathy as fate. She shows us what it looks like when a thinker refuses to retreat from the implications of her own insights.

Empathy, in Stein’s hands, is not something we deploy. It is something we undergo. And once undergone, it changes how one inhabits the world.

That may be empathy’s greatest ontological demand of us.

Empathy, Selfhood, and the Fear of Porosity

Read against Suicidal Empathy, Stein’s life exposes a crucial misdiagnosis. What Saad names as empathy’s suicidal tendency is, at a deeper level, the fear of ontological porosity. The danger he senses is not empathy per se, but the collapse of a model of selfhood built on enclosure, control, and insulation from others’ claims.

From within that model, empathy must indeed be dangerous. If the self is a bounded container, then any sustained openness threatens depletion. Relation becomes invasion. Responsibility becomes theft. Withdrawal masquerades as wisdom.

Stein does not deny the cost of openness. Her life makes that impossible. What she denies is that enclosure is ever a genuine alternative. Empathy, in her phenomenological account, is not something added to an otherwise intact self. It reveals that the self was never intact in that sense to begin with. Consciousness is already exposed, already addressed, and already implicated.

This is why Stein cannot simply “turn empathy down.” There is no dial. There is only the choice between acknowledging relational vulnerability or fleeing into abstraction.

From this angle, the language of “suicidal empathy” that so many podcasters, YouTubers, and creators want to cling to risks misnaming the problem. What appears to be self-destruction may instead be the collision between two incompatible ontologies: one that assumes sovereignty and control, and one that recognizes participation and exposure as fundamental.

Stein’s refusal to abandon others was not a psychological failure. It was a metaphysical consistency.

None of this licenses coercive self-sacrifice or moral blackmail. Stein’s death does not obligate anyone else to follow her path. But it does stand as a rebuke to any account of empathy that treats withdrawal as the highest form of rationality. It reminds us that some forms of self-preservation depend on a prior fiction of separateness.

The real danger, then, is not an empathy that goes too far, but a culture that teaches us to fear what empathy reveals about who we are.

If empathy is structural rather than elective and ontological rather than sentimental, then the task is not to suppress it but to learn how to inhabit it without illusion. Stein does not offer comfort here. She offers clarity. And clarity, in a world built on sealed selves, will always feel dangerous.

That danger may not be suicidal. It may simply be the cost of refusing to lie about the nature of being.

Plasma, Bubbles, and an Ontology of Empathy

Plasma is not a metaphor, but a problem. We don’t learn a great deal about plasma in school, but it certainly exists and is the main component of all the matter in the universe (and I’m writing this as someone who taught AP Physics, Physical Science, and Earth and Space Science for almost twenty years in various schools here in the Carolinas!). But plasma is a problem with how we imagine form, boundary, and relation, which is why it’s offloaded as “another state of matter” in our school textbooks, but not explored in depth unless you take higher-level physics courses in college. Plasma resists being treated as a thing, however. It gathers, disperses, and responds to fields. It holds structure without closure. It behaves less like an object and more like an event…patterned, responsive, never fully contained.

That resistance matters. It presses against one of the most deeply sedimented assumptions of modern thought that reality is composed of discrete, self-contained units with clear edges. Subjects here, objects there. Minds inside, world outside. Consciousness is an interior chamber from which we look out through our eyes.

Plasma doesn’t cooperate with that picture. Neither, I’m increasingly convinced, does consciousness.

Plasma is not rare or exotic. It is the most common state of matter in the universe. Stars are plasma. Auroras are plasma. Lightning traces plasma paths through the sky. Even here, close to the surface of things, plasma appears wherever energy, matter, and field interact in unstable but patterned ways. What distinguishes it is not chaos, but responsiveness. Plasma organizes itself in relation to surrounding forces. It forms filaments, sheaths, and membranes. It is structured, but never sealed.

That combination, form without closure, is one of those “not-normal” ideas about plasma that has stuck with me and causes me to be fascinated by this aspect of our cosmos.

Likewise, a bubble is not a solid thing. It is a relation held in tension (fascinating history of that term, which I’ll go into in a later post). A bubble’s boundary is “real,” but it is not a wall. It is a membrane… thin, responsive, constantly negotiating between inside and outside. A bubble exists only as long as the conditions that sustain it remain. Its form is defined by pressure, by exchange, by the delicate balance of forces it does not control. And they fascinate children who are seemingly more open to “not normal” experiences with reality.

Importantly, bubbles do not need to be isolated to remain distinct. They can cluster. They can press against one another. They can share boundaries without collapsing into sameness. Their integrity is not maintained by separation, but by tension (the Greek term tonos, which we get the word tension in English, is also connected to musical tones, which seems fitting).

I find myself wondering whether this is a better way to think about consciousness.

Much of modern philosophy and psychology still relies on a container model of mind. Consciousness is imagined as something housed inside the skull, bounded by skin, sealed off from the world except through carefully regulated inputs. Perception, on this view, is a delivery system. Empathy becomes an imaginative leap across a gap, while relation is always secondary.

But this model struggles to explain some of the most ordinary features of experience. It cannot easily account for the way moods permeate spaces, how grief lingers in landscapes, or why certain places feel charged long after an event has passed. It treats empathy as an achievement rather than a condition. And it renders the world strangely inert…a collection of objects awaiting interpretation.

Phenomenology has long resisted this picture. Thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty insist that perception is not a projection outward from an interior mind, but a participation in a shared field (again, more allusions to physics). The body is not a container for consciousness, but its mode of openness. We do not first exist as sealed subjects and then relate. We emerge through relation.

Seen this way, consciousness begins to look less like a chamber and more like a membrane. Structured, yes…but porous. Distinct, but never isolated, and sustained by relations it does not author.

This is where empathy becomes especially revealing.

Empathy is often treated as a moral virtue or an emotional skill. Something we cultivate in order to be better people. But phenomenologically, empathy appears much earlier than ethics. It is the basic experience of being addressed by another consciousness. As Edith Stein argued with remarkable precision, empathy is not emotional contagion or imaginative projection. It is the direct givenness of another’s experience as other…a presence that is not mine, yet not inaccessible.

What matters here is what empathy presupposes. It assumes that consciousness is not sealed. That there is permeability at the boundary, and one field of experience can register another without collapse or confusion. Empathy only makes sense if consciousness is already open.

In this light, empathy is not something consciousness does after the fact. It is evidence of how consciousness is structured in the first place.

This is where the image of the bubble returns with force. Consciousness, like a bubble, maintains its integrity not by hard enclosure but by responsive tension. Its boundaries are real, but they are sites of exchange. Empathy occurs at the membrane, and is where another’s presence presses close enough to be felt without being absorbed.

If this is right, then many of our ethical and ecological failures are not simply failures of will. They are failures of perception. They arise from an ontology that imagines selves as sealed units and treats relation as optional. When the world is apprehended as external and inert, care becomes intervention. Responsibility becomes management while action outruns attention.

This helps explain my growing unease with the language of solutions in ecological discourse. Solutions presume problems that can be isolated and systems that can be controlled from above. They rely, often implicitly, on a model of consciousness that stands outside what it seeks to fix. But ecological crises are not engineering glitches. They are symptoms of fractured relation… between humans and land, between perception and participation, and between ourselves and the cosmos.

A bubble ontology does not promise mastery. It cannot guarantee outcomes. What it offers instead is a more faithful description of how beings actually persist: through tension, vulnerability, and responsiveness. It suggests that ethical action must emerge from attunement rather than command. That care begins with learning how to remain present to what exceeds us.

Ecological encounters often happen at boundaries, such as fog lifting from a field, frost tracing the edge of a leaf, or wind moving through branches. These are not moments of clarity so much as moments of thickness, where distinctions remain but do not harden. They feel, in a small way, plasma-like. Charged, relational, and alive with forces that do not resolve into objects.

Perhaps consciousness belongs to this same family of phenomena. Not a substance to be located, but a pattern sustained by relation. Not a sovereign interior, but a delicate, responsive membrane. If so, empathy is not an add-on to an otherwise isolated self. It is a clue…a trace of the deeper structure of being.

What if consciousness is less a sealed interior and more a field held together by tensions we did not choose? What if its openness is not a vulnerability to be managed, but the very condition that makes response possible at all?

I don’t offer this as a solution. Only as an orientation or a way of learning to stay with the world without pretending it is simpler, or more controllable, than it is. Sometimes, the most faithful response begins by noticing the shape of what is already here.

Letting the World Appear

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to let the world appear.

Not to analyze it.

Not to manage it.

Not even to care for it (at least not yet).

Just to allow the world to show up as something other than an extension of myself.

So much of contemporary life trains us in a posture of extraction. We move through days asking what can be used, optimized, corrected, or explained. Even our best intentions, from ethical concern, activism, and compassion, often arrive after the world has already been reduced to an object of concern. We rush toward response without lingering long enough with perception.

But perception, I’m increasingly convinced, is not neutral. It is already a moral act.

To perceive carefully is to allow the possibility that what I encounter exceeds me… that it carries its own depth, rhythm, and interiority, even if I cannot name it. This is true when I’m listening to another person speak. It’s also true when I’m standing near a tree, watching weather move across a field, or reading a text written centuries ago by someone whose world I will never fully inhabit.

What we often call empathy begins here, not as feeling-with, but as restraint. A refusal to rush in. A willingness to let the other remain partially opaque.

This matters because many of our current crises (ecological, political, spiritual, especially) are not simply failures of care. They are failures of attention. We have learned how to act without learning how to see. The result is a world that feels thin, instrumental, and endlessly available for use.

But when the world is allowed to appear on its own terms, something shifts. Places become storied rather than scenic. Communities become thick with memory rather than data points. Nonhuman life stops being “environment” and starts registering as presence. This doesn’t give us an answer about what to do next. And maybe that’s the point.

Before ethics, there is perception.

Before action, there is address.

Before care, there is the quiet discipline of letting the world show up as more than ours.

Today, at least, that feels like enough.

I’m trying to practice this kind of attention in small, ordinary ways. This past year, that practice has taken the form of tracking a black walnut tree in my backyard… returning to it again and again, not to extract meaning, but to notice what shows itself over time. The notes from that ongoing practice are gathered at samharrelson.com/tracking. It’s a reminder, for me at least, that learning to let the world appear is not a theory so much as a habit… one that grows slowly, like the tree itself.

Empathy Before Relation: Edith Stein and the World That Appears Between Us

Empathy is often described as a bridge between subjects. One consciousness reaches toward another, imaginatively or affectively, and something like understanding takes place. Even in its more careful phenomenological treatments, empathy is typically framed as relational… a way of accessing the interior life of another while preserving difference. Edith Stein’s account is frequently read in this way, and rightly so. Her insistence that empathy is neither emotional contagion nor projection remains one of the most disciplined analyses we have.

But I want to suggest that there is something even more radical at work in Stein’s notion of empathy… something that has not been fully explored. Empathy, for Stein, is not only a relation between subjects. It is a condition for the appearance of a shared world at all.

In On the Problem of Empathy, Stein describes empathy as the experience of “foreign consciousness” that is given to me as foreign, not fused with my own. This insistence on non-identity is crucial. But what often goes unnoticed is that empathy, in Stein’s account, does not simply add new content to an already stable world. It reconfigures the world’s depth. The world becomes thicker, layered with perspectives that I do not inhabit but must now account for. Empathy is thus not an ethical achievement layered onto perception. It is a modification of perception itself.

This is where Stein quietly departs from many later accounts of empathy (and especially tech/podcast influencers who see empathy as a weakness). Empathy is not something I do after recognizing another subject. It is the very means by which the world discloses itself as more than my own field of experience. Without empathy, the world collapses into what Husserl might call a solipsistic horizon… coherent, perhaps, but flattened. Empathy introduces dimensionality. It discloses that the world exceeds me, not abstractly, but concretely, through others who perceive, suffer, attend, and respond in ways I cannot fully access.

Seen this way, empathy is not primarily interpersonal. It is ontological.

This matters because it allows us to rethink empathy beyond the human without reducing it to sentimentality. If empathy is a way the world shows up as exceeding my own perspective, then the presence of nonhuman others… animals, plants, landscapes, even historical communities… need not be justified by analogy to human interiority. The question is not whether trees “have feelings like ours,” but whether our perceptual posture allows the world to appear as more-than-human in the first place. Empathy becomes the disciplined openness that resists premature closure.

This reframing also clarifies why empathy must precede ethics. Ethical systems often assume a world already populated with relevant agents. Stein’s insight runs deeper. Empathy is the condition by which beings become morally visible at all. Without it, ethics degenerates into abstraction… rules applied to a world we have not truly perceived.

In an age of ecological crisis, this has profound implications. The failure is not simply that we lack compassion. It is that our world has become perceptually thin. We move through landscapes, histories, and communities without allowing them to register as having their own depth. Stein offers no environmental program, no political manifesto. What she offers instead is more unsettling… a demand that we learn again how to let the world appear as other than ourselves.

Empathy, in this sense, is not about feeling more. It is about seeing more carefully. And that, perhaps, is its quiet power as St. Edith Stein was pointing us toward.

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

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

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

Abstract

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

Learning to Be Addressed by Trees publicDownload

Before We Decide What Matters: Minneapolis, ICE, and the Work of Attention

If you’re like me, you are tired of being told what matters. Every day arrives already crowded with urgency from cable news to social media to our email inboxes. There is always something demanding a response, a position, a statement, a judgment. The crises are real and here at home, as we’re seeing in Minneapolis, but also here in Spartanburg. Ecological collapse, technological acceleration, political fracture, spiritual exhaustion. And yet the constant pressure to decide, to weigh in with friends or on social media, to declare allegiance or outrage over Trump’s latest missive, even which news outlets to consume… often leaves us less capable of genuine care rather than more. Moral life begins to feel like triage, and eventually like performance.

I have been wondering whether this exhaustion has less to do with a lack of ethics and more to do with how quickly we rush toward them.

Before we decide what matters, something quieter has already taken place. The world has appeared to us in a certain way. Something has shown up as worthy of concern, or not. Something has addressed us, or passed unnoticed. That prior moment, the way the world first comes into view, is rarely examined. Social media algorithms are designed to outrage us before we have even a moment to process an event. And yet this initial moment of appearance may be the most decisive moral act we ever perform.

Attention is not neutral. It is formative.

We often speak about ethics as if it begins with principles, values, or rules. But those only function once something has already been perceived as meaningful. I cannot care about what I do not notice. I cannot respond to what never appears. Long before moral reasoning begins, there is a posture of perception, a way of being present to what is other than myself.

This is where empathy has become important to me again, not as a sentiment or virtue, but as a mode of knowing. Empathy, understood phenomenologically, is not agreement or emotional fusion. It is not a projection of myself into another, nor a collapse of difference. For Edith Stein, empathy names the experience in which another’s interiority becomes present to me as other, irreducible, and real. It is a way of perceiving foreign consciousness without possessing it.

Crucially, empathy in this sense is not something that follows understanding. It is what makes understanding possible in the first place.

Seen this way, empathy is not primarily ethical. It is ontological. It concerns how beings appear to one another, how the world is allowed to disclose itself, how alterity is either received or flattened. Stein is careful here. Empathy does not erase distance. It preserves it. The other is never absorbed into my own experience, but neither is the other sealed off from me. Relation becomes possible without domination.

For example, this matters deeply for how we think about ecology. Much contemporary environmental discourse quickly shifts toward solutions, metrics, and outcomes, from AI data center debates at city council meetings to creation care initiatives once a group decides to engage locally. These are necessary, but they often skip the slower work of learning how to see. Ecology becomes a problem to manage rather than a field of relationships in which we already participate. The natural world is framed as a resource, a threat, or a victim, rarely as a presence capable of addressing us.

Stein herself did not write ecological theory, but her account of empathy offers a discipline of attention that easily extends beyond the human. If empathy is the experience of encountering another as a center of meaning, not of my own making, then it trains us to resist reducing the world to what it can be used for or controlled. It teaches restraint before response. Attention changes this.

To attend to a tree across seasons, to notice how it sheds, scars, and persists, is not to solve anything. It is to be apprenticed into a different tempo of significance. Ecological time resists panic not by denying urgency, but by deepening responsibility. It trains us to remain with what unfolds slowly, unevenly, and often without spectacle.

This kind of attention does not produce immediate answers. It produces orientation.

I have come to think that much of our moral confusion stems from a failure of perception rather than a failure of values. We argue about what ought to be done while remaining inattentive to what is actually present. We leap toward ethical frameworks while bypassing the more difficult task Stein insists upon by allowing the other to show itself as it is, before we decide what it means or what is owed.

Attention is costly (and incredibly valuable, as social media algorithms have taught us over the last decade, as I noted in my 2015 post). It requires patience, vulnerability, and restraint. It asks us to linger rather than react, to receive rather than master. In a culture shaped by speed and extraction with news cycles lasting just a couple of days, this can feel almost irresponsible. And yet without it, our ethics float free of the world they claim to serve.

To attend is already to take responsibility.

Not because attention guarantees correct action, but because it establishes the conditions under which action can be something other than projection or control. When we learn to notice, to listen, to allow meaning to emerge rather than be imposed, we begin to recover a moral life that is responsive rather than reactive.

Perhaps the most urgent task before us is not deciding what matters next, but recovering the capacity to perceive what has been asking something of us all along.

Footnote: Edith Stein describes empathy not as inference, emotional contagion, or imaginative projection, but as a direct experiential act in which another’s consciousness is given as other while remaining irreducibly distinct from one’s own. Empathy, for Stein, is thus neither ethical evaluation nor moral sentiment, but a foundational mode of perception through which meaning first becomes accessible. See Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989), 10–12, 19–21.

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

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.

Curiosity and Empathy Aren’t Bad: What Leonardo da Vinci Can Teach Us

Leonardo da Vinci is often treated as the emblem of genius, the Renaissance mind par excellence. And yet, late in life, Leonardo regarded himself as something of a failure (a point that gets picked up a good deal in mainstream articles about him these days). He believed he had not finished enough, not delivered enough, not brought his restless investigations to proper completion, as in this post I read this morning, Why Da Vinci Thought He Was a Failure, The Culturist.

Obviously, this feels almost absurd. How could someone whose work reshaped art, anatomy, engineering, and natural observation judge himself so harshly… The Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, having a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle named after you (also my favorite one)? But if we approach Leonardo phenomenologically, attending not to outcomes but to lived experience, his dissatisfaction begins to make a different kind of sense.

What Leonardo struggled with was not a lack of talent or discipline, but the burden of curiosity itself.

Curiosity as a Way of Being

Leonardo’s notebooks reveal a mind endlessly drawn outward. I suffer similar tendencies, and the notebooks that I’ve meticulously kept since around 2010 would probably testify to that for an outside reader. He observed water curling around obstacles, birds banking in flight, muscles tightening beneath skin, and light diffusing through air. These observations were not collected for a single project. They were acts of sustained attention to the world as it presented itself.

Curiosity, for Leonardo, was not an instrument aimed at mastery. It was an orientation toward phenomena, a continual turning of the self toward whatever appeared. In phenomenological terms, this resembles intentionality, the basic structure of consciousness as always being consciousness of something that we find in Edmund Husserl’s Ideas I (PDF here).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty later argued that perception itself is a bodily engagement with the world rather than a detached mental representation (Phenomenology of Perception… dense but one of my fav works that should be more read these days!). Leonardo seems to have intuited this centuries earlier. His curiosity was embodied, sensory, and relational. He learned by lingering, sketching, returning, and allowing phenomena to resist easy explanation.

From this perspective, curiosity is not a trait one possesses. It is a way of inhabiting the world.

Why Curiosity Can Feel Like Failure

Leonardo’s sense of failure arose precisely because this mode of being does not align well with cultures of completion. He moved slowly, followed questions wherever they led, and often abandoned works when new phenomena called for his attention. Patrons expected finished paintings. Leonardo found himself perpetually unfinished. I often feel the same!

Phenomenologically speaking, this tension reflects a clash between two temporalities. One is the linear time of production and achievement. The other is the lived time of attention, where meaning unfolds through repeated encounters and deepening perception.

Leonardo lived primarily in the second. What looks like failure from the outside can, from within, be fidelity to experience. To remain curious is to resist closure. It is to stay with the world longer than efficiency allows. It’s certainly a curse on one level and we often treat it with pharmaceutical medication these days… but it’s also a blessing or superpower, depending on your persuasion.

Empathy as Curiosity Turned Relational

Leonardo’s curiosity did not stop at nature or mechanics. It extended deeply into human expression. His drawings and paintings reveal a remarkable sensitivity to gesture, posture, and facial expression. He did not simply depict bodies. He rendered states of being.

This is where curiosity becomes empathy.

Phenomenologically, empathy is not projection or emotional contagion. Edith Stein describes it as a way of accessing another’s experience while preserving their otherness (Stein, On the Problem of Empathy PDF, which should be required reading in all colleges and universities, if not in high schools). Empathy begins with curiosity, with the willingness to attend to another without collapsing them into our own expectations.

Leonardo’s art practices this attentiveness. His figures invite us to linger with them, to sense the interiority suggested by an angle of the head or a softness around the eyes. He does not explain them. He lets them be encountered.

This pairing of curiosity and empathy is essential. Curiosity without empathy becomes extractive. Empathy without curiosity becomes sentimental. Together, they form a disciplined openness to reality as it shows itself.

Curiosity Beyond the Human

Leonardo’s curiosity was also ecological, long before the term existed. He did not treat nature as inert matter to be controlled. Water had character. Air had movement. Plants and animals exhibited their own intelligences.

This resonates strongly with phenomenological approaches to ecology, where attention is given not only to systems but to lived encounters with the more-than-human world. To observe a tree across seasons, or to watch how rain alters the texture of soil, is not merely to gather data. It is to practice a form of relational knowing grounded in care.

Curiosity, in this sense, is ethical before it is theoretical. It teaches us how to stay with what exceeds us.

Real Being as Attentive Presence

Leonardo’s evident dissatisfaction with his life’s output may say less about his achievements and more about the cost of living attentively in a world that rewards closure. His life suggests that real being does not consist in finishing everything we begin, but in remaining responsive to what continually addresses us.

Curiosity keeps us open. Empathy keeps us responsible.

Together, they shape a way of being that is not centered on control or accumulation, but on presence, participation, and care. If Leonardo indeed felt like a failure, perhaps it was because he measured himself by standards that could never capture the depth of his engagement with the world.

Phenomenology invites us to reconsider those standards. It asks not what we have produced, but how we have learned to see, to listen, and to remain with what is given.

In that light, curiosity and empathy are not distractions from real being. They are its conditions.

Christmas Without Sentiment: Edith Stein and the God Who Enters Finitude

Every year, Christmas arrives already crowded.

Crowded with lights, crowded with music, crowded with Hallmark Channel movies, crowded with memory and expectation. Even those of us who love the feast time often feel a quiet pressure to feel something specific… joy, warmth, reassurance. Christmas often becomes a kind of emotional performance, even in the church.

As much as our modern nativity scenes of the incarnation of Jesus are a harmony of the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke (an ancient practice going back to the beginnings of Christian writings, as we see in Tatian’s Diatessaron discovered at my beloved Dura Europos in modern-day Syria in the 1930s) with shepherds, angels, magi and timber all mixing together in a crowded space, our own performances and expectations are a harmony of these accumulated cultural projections and perceived normative truths.

Edith Stein helps me breathe differently around Christmas.

Not because she writes sweetly about the nativity… she doesn’t. And not because she offers seasonal reflections in the usual sense. What she gives instead is something far more demanding and, to my mind, far more faithful with a way of understanding Christmas as an event of ontological descent… God entering finitude without rescue clauses.

Incarnation as Entry, Not Appearance

In Finite and Eternal Being, Stein’s central concern is the relationship between eternal being and finite being. Creation itself is already a kind of gift, but the Incarnation intensifies that gift to the point of vulnerability. God does not merely touch finitude from above. God enters it from within, accepting its conditions rather than suspending them (Finite and Eternal Being, 352–360).

This matters for how I think about Christmas and how we should engage with this event, individually and culturally (rather than ceding our engagement to capitalist corporate control).

The child in the manger is not a divine exception to creaturely life. The Christ child is not insulated from time, hunger, exposure, or risk as the Gospels make abundantly clear. Christmas, in Stein’s metaphysical imagination, is the moment when eternal being consents to be shaped by the rhythms of finite existence.

God learns time from the inside. That alone should unsettle most of our Christmas instincts.

Christmas Already Contains the Cross

Stein never allows Christmas to float free from Good Friday. In The Science of the Cross, written during the final years of her life, she describes Christ’s entire existence as a single movement of self-giving love that begins with Incarnation and culminates in total surrender (The Science of the Cross, 20–28).

From this perspective, Christmas is not a pause before suffering begins. It is the first step of suffering and ultimately redemption.

The infant’s vulnerability in the Gospels is not symbolic. It is real. Exposure is not delayed until Calvary. It begins in Bethlehem much as it does today, with the birth of Palestinian children facing so many challenges that they are not responsible for nor should have to inherit.

This is why Stein’s Christmas feels so unsentimental to me. There is no divine safety net quietly waiting backstage. God does not visit human life. God commits to it. Instead of asking “Mary Did You Know?” we should be asking “God, Did You Know?”

Empathy Taken All the Way Down

Years earlier, in On the Problem of Empathy, Stein defines empathy as a way of entering another’s experience without collapsing the distinction between self and other (On the Problem of Empathy, 10–18). Empathy is not projection. It is not imagination alone. It is a disciplined openness to being affected by another while remaining oneself, which is often opposed to modern conceptions of empathy.

When Stein later reflects on the Incarnation, it becomes impossible not to see it as empathy radicalized beyond psychology and into ontology itself.

Christmas is not God observing human life with perfect knowledge. It is God living a human life from within finite consciousness. God allows Godself to be addressed by the world.

As someone working through ecological intentionality, I find Stein quietly indispensable here. Christmas is not just about human salvation. It is about divine responsiveness to material reality… to bodies, to limits, to history.

Hiddenness, Not Spectacle

In Stein’s letters from her Carmelite years, Christmas appears quietly, almost in passing. What she emphasizes is not celebration but hiddenness. God enters the world unnoticed and is recognized only by those keeping watch (the magi and the shepherds, in their respective accounts in Matthew and Luke). Recognition requires attentiveness and intentionality rather than announcement.

My own practices of slow noticing by sitting with a black walnut tree in winter and throughout 2025, attending to bark and leaf litter and time without spectacle, have quietly taught me the value of this sort of intentionality.

Christmas, for Stein, is not loud. There is no grand culmination of Handel’s Messiah. Incarnation happens when no one is watching carefully enough.

Christmas After Auschwitz

It is impossible to read Stein’s later work without knowing how her life ends. A Jewish philosopher, a teacher, a Catholic Carmelite, and murdered at Auschwitz with hundreds of others on August 9, 1942. Christmas, read backward through that history, becomes unbearable if we expect it to function as reassurance.

Stein does not let it.

Christmas does not promise escape from historical suffering. It places God inside it. Eternal being does not hover safely above violence and loss. It enters conditions in which love can be rejected, destroyed, or silenced. That is not comforting in any shallow sense. But it is faithful.

Why I Return to Stein at Christmas

I return to Edith Stein in December because she will not let me sentimentalize the Incarnation. She reminds me that Christmas is not about divine power softened for human consumption. It is about divine vulnerability embraced without reserve.

God becomes finite. God becomes dependent. God is exposed to the elements of Creation as well as human frailty, cruelty, joy, and love.

And in doing so, finitude itself is no longer something to be escaped by rapture or an afterlife of harp playing in the clouds. It becomes the place where meaning happens.

Christmas, then, is not a break from the world’s grief. It is God’s decision to dwell within it and to be directly addressed by that grief. That is a hard truth. But it is also, quietly, a hopeful one… if we are willing to sit still long enough to let it speak.