Replies

Great questions, Leon!

I personally wonder if there’s room for evil in Whitehead’s stuff, but I’m sure we’ll get there.

Love the recommendation!

@Dennis. I’m originally from Missouri, moved here 14 years ago. I teach at Fayetteville State University.

Glad to see you here again, Dennis!

Jay, how does this jibe with the notion we encountered earlier that God can “know” all possible outcomes in the future (even as God is open to them)?

I’m a theatre artist and sometime musician and love what you’ve brought up here, Dennis. There’s a play called ‘Art’ by Yasmina Reza that explores the question of the plain white canvas in great depth. For me, I’ve thought a lot about the dance necessary between repetition/ritual and difference/surprise in order to create beauty. In your case, I’d maybe argue that your favorite section of Blue Ridge vista is possible because of a kind of sameness that comes before it — closed in trees, similar colors, monotony of the road itself before these things open up in an experiential contrast and not just one of color/texture/shape or other values.

I like Ward’s assertion that if there is a God of love, there has to be an afterlife. I’ve never heard it put quite that way.

I love thinking through these fallacies and think they might serve as the basis for some kinds of spiritual practice on an individual and social level.

The Fallacy of the Perfect Dictionary leads me to think a lot about different forms of Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism who make claims about the authority and completeness of their “perfect” dictionaries of scriptural interpretation.

I love your discussion of the Fallacy of Simple location and how it calls forth the idea of the Body of Christ as a process that unfolds over time.

I share your affinity for the Blue Ridge mountains. It is so compelling to think of them as communities and as a locus of meaning that creates other communities (like people who love the Blue Ridge).

Thanks for bringing this up. As I read it, I thought, “hang on, rocks get wet. They gather moss and lichens. They crack. They erode. Isn’t that experience?”

I imagine there is a set of things that happen across experiences when experiencers encounter beauty. In humans, this could be a variety of physiological responses — quickening breath and pulse, dilated pupils, activation in part of the brain, hormone secretion, and perhaps the emergence of certain kinds of feelings or thoughts. Of course, I don’t think humans experience these things in the same ways — there could be (functionally) infinite ways of experiencing such an experiential checklist. So I guess this is a way of saying that some parts of experiencing beauty do have objective components, but that the experience taken as a whole is subjective.

I’m really struck by John’s use of Jung here. The implication is that there are lures, but not all of them are “true” lures, perhaps?

I come to this as a theatre and music artist. I’d define experience as something that can be experienced in and as a body.

What you say here is a really delightful distillation of the readings.

“We should see that our activities, our actions, our relationships with one another and the world make up who we are. We emerge from our felt interactions with one another.”

There’s a sense that we are defined by the negative space around us — we are defined by the processes in which we engage.