Ken Miller desolves Phillip E. Johnson in this exchange of letters about intelligent design. Johnson is, in my estimation, the worst philosopher who has ever descended from primitive primates. But his inability to fit together his propositions logically is not as pathetic as the content of those propositions.
Monthly Archives: March 2005
ONE UNSAID WORD
Elsewhere I am likely to make personal comments about world events. I make an exception this evening here. The Schiavo case is for me, a phenomonologist with archetypal leanings, the bookend to Gibson’s The Passion of Christ. In The Passion, relentless suffering of the sancrosanct object The Christ; in the flesh and blood of T.S. the relentless and solipsistic suffering of those for whom she is their object. The ‘sensitive’ in the afermath of their encounter with the simulcra Christ, (crudely outfitted with the special ‘effects,’ while in real time actual unspeakable suffering was visited on peoples in the crucible of civilization – not effects, but effective,) would easily cathect the simulated cinematic crucifixion into, for them, personal catharsis. Sure, one is moved, yet to what?
The unsaid word is, of course, Mercy. And, over many daily ‘news cycles’ it is Mercy itself that is so sunk into the shadow of humanity. For it is Mercy that is unspoken, unheard, and it is Mercy that cannot be roused. The hideous consequences of scapegoating Mercy are incalculable. As for Terri, why wouldn’t we prefer her to be released to the peace of the afterlife if we’re inclined to hope Paradise exists?
Until we allow Mercy to happen, unfold, for God knows Best, we will have war and wars like this. Cinematic portrayals will enthrall us. We will do everything to avoid any understanding at all while calling out a “culture of life” with the stench of death all around us; cluster bombs not flowers.
It has all been merciless.
Filed under current events, Religion
STEP TRAINING
Are some experiences more “experiential”?
Scale of Experientiality. Gibbons and Hopkins (1980)
(The schema embedded in the paper is a thought provoker.)
Filed under experiential learning
STRAIGHT TO THE PLAYFUL HEART
In my trolling for items of interest, I happened upon a terrific resource, the web site of Yannis Karaliotas. He’s an explorer and scholar with very similar affinities to my own. His paper, “The Element of Play in Learning” is among the many keepers at his site. The subtitle to the paper is “The Role of Synergetic Playful Environments in the Implementation of Open and Distance Learning”. Yup.
Filed under adult learning
COMPLEX PSYCHOLOGIES
My own sense is that C.G.Jung’s lifework becomes mostly phenomenological and echoes his Jamesian roots profoundly in its last stage, when his alchemical inquiry moves into peculiarities of soul-making unable to be encompassed by a dualistic psychology of complex and transference. (It is in this last stage that Jung’s psychology truly becomes paradoxical and justifies the essence of ‘irrational facts’.) This crossover finds a place in the post-Jungian universe firstly through James Hillman.
Filed under analytic(al) psychology
GRANELEDONE BOREOPACIFICA
Well, how about this: the idea that within the US administration there are rogue tentacles that go around the world doing exactly the same but almost entirely out of any centralized control system? To me, that is even scarier.
To me too. Well put, Helena.
Helena Cobban Just World News Blog
Filed under current events
TEACH THE OLD DOG ANYWAY
Cleveland, Ohio, (post-modernized to be “NEO”) is where I’m at. It’s a region slogging through its post-industrial dark night: post-industrial, ambivalent, self-deprecating, unfashionable, fragmented, and liminal. It’s neither old or new age, nor is it progressive or regressive. NEOland is poor at its heart and wealthy at its extremities. Creative energy moves fitfully through its sclerotic arteries. It’s feudal too; . . . a delapidated city-state, who’s guardians go unguarded. Its crisis is a crisis of arousal.
What’s fascinating is how the short ‘half-life’ of so much in CleveNEO, political celebrity, sports teams, its various articifaces: hall of fame, office parks and malls; industries, night spots and almost every ‘initiative,’ hides a grubby tenacity.
Filed under Kenneth Warren
