A philosophical critique of “suicidal empathy,” drawing on Edith Stein to rethink empathy, selfhood, and the porous structure of consciousness.

Jobs, education, environment, and the lived ecology that holds them together.

Honea Path, resurrection, and the work whose meaning exceeds visible success Yesterday afternoon, a remarkable thunderstorm moved across Spartanburg as we gathered for the UCC Progressive Christian service at the Unitarian Universalist Church. Rain fell hard enough to make driving difficult, while thunder rolled over the sanctuary, and lightning kept plenty of sensible people at home. The congregation in the room was small.

One of those chains of events that future A.P. Us History students will study and think, “Huh, why did Americans allow that to happen?” sort of like what led to Sinclair’s The Jungle in the early 20th century (I had to write an essay on that for my exam when I was one of those A.P. students in 1996)... Opinion | Why Did Trump Order Up 660 Million Pounds of Mystery Meat?

I’m preaching here in Spartanburg, SC, today at the Progressive Christian community (held at the Unitarian Universalist Church) at 4 pm. The theme is “laboring not in vain” from Paul, and I’m talking a good deal about the Chiquola Mill Massacre from 92 years ago in a textile mill in Honea Path, SC… how communities can suffer, what our labor means, and how even small towns can bury a Bloody Thursday for decades.

I awoke this morning to the news that Wendell Berry had died, and it devastated me. Berry is one of those writers whose work has been with me for so long that I have a hard time remembering who I was before I encountered it. But I do remember where it began. I was a senior at Wofford College, sitting in a seminar class, when I first read “

Plasma, empathy, and the interval between relation and experience I have written several times about plasma consciousness (it's something I'm really fascinated about from my background of teaching Physics for so many years), especially in a short piece called “Plasma Consciousness: Thinking With the Luminous Universe.” Of everything I have published here over the past year, that post has continued to find the most readers.

At the Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg, what I would ordinarily call a sermon is called a meditation. That turned out to be the right word for what I was invited to offer there over two Sundays this August. Their Pastor Scott Neely asked me to think with the congregation about home. I had been writing for much of the summer about watersheds, attention, Edith Stein, and the moral life of a place, so I began with the most ordinary piece of ground I know: the slope behind our house in Spartanburg, where rain leaves the roof, crosses the yard beneath a black walnut, and begins its long movement toward Fairforest Creek, the Pacolet, the Broad, the Congaree, the Santee, and finally the Atlantic.

Known for her outsize persona, appearance and talent, she rose from rural poverty to become a top-selling singer, songwriter and entrepreneur.

I finished the first of my two comprehensive examination papers this summer in the Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. The paper is titled “Ecological Intentionality, Creaturely Form, and The Ecology of the Cross: A Cruciform Phenomenology of Creaturely Relation.” It's the most sustained attempt I have made so far to explain what I mean by…

Notes toward an ecological intentionality, between one comprehensive exam and the next The black walnut behind our house is dropping fruit again. It does this every year before I think it should. By late July, while the rest of the yard still seems occupied with the green abundance of summer, the first walnuts begin striking the roof of the shed and landing in the grass with a weight you can hear from inside.

A seven-year-old's misspelling, the root of a warning, and the drip line of a black walnut

I wrote this post in August of 2017 on the growing adoption of smart home devices (Alexa, Google Home, etc.). And now I’m using Wispr Flow to make this post from my iPhone (which looks roughly the same as one from 2017 but has changed so much) and I find myself using voice much more than fingers to do my work of writing.

Just finished my paper for Comprehensive Exams in my PhD program (came in at 54 pages)…Ecological Intentionality, Creaturely Form, and The Ecology of the Cross: A Cruciform Phenomenology of Creaturely Relation. Basically laying out the whole framework of The Ecology of the Cross with ecological intentionality as a tool. Lots of Edith Stein, Aristotle, Bergson, Ruyer, and St John of the Cross while arguing with Deleuze. Fun times! Going to go sleep for a few days (just kidding, we have 3 young kids). 🥱

Nice surprise to see CIIS doing a little feature on my work! What a great community, and I highly recommend the Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion program. Wofford College, Yale University, Gardner-Webb University, and CIIS have shaped so much of my life over these last 30 (yikes!) years, and I’m so grateful for them! Being Addressed by the World: A Ph.D. in the More-Than-Human | CIIS…

On the Feast of Edith Stein, August 9. A shorter, more devotional companion to this post appeared this morning at Carolina Ecology. The church keeps a martyr's feast on the day of her death... the dies natalis, the birthday into the life that doesn't end. August 9 belongs to Edith Stein, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau on this day in 1942.

I find this sort of thing so fascinating and hope we continue exploring this interplay between ancient humans of various species... Rock crystal scraper: 45,000-year-old Neanderthal tool that shows they had an 'eye for beauty of form and color' | Live Science: A century ago, American archaeologists excavating at a cave site in France unearthed a cache of seven rock crystal tools made by Neanderthals. The discovery was one of the first to prove that Neanderthals were not the unintelligent brutes that many scientists of the time believed they were.

I’ve just finished reading the intro so far, and I’m finding much to like in this new work by Jessie DeGrado on the interplay between the Assyrian empire(s) and ancient Israel, biblical texts, museum reception, and modern receptions. Neat framing in a decolonial context! I’ve been thinking of working on an updated and expanded Asia Has Claims Upon New England…

Excited to share that my poem 12 Cedar Roses was selected for the South Carolina Bards Poetry Anthology 2026. I wrote the poem for Merianna on our 12th anniversary, and the two ancient cedars it references are the ones I’m looking at now in our front yard right now. I debated on publishing this one originally, but glad that it’s found its own little life.  Love is not a bloom we hold, but the trees that keep making them.

I got my first tattoo today, up in Asheville, thanks to the amazing folks at Thistle and Pearl. It's a black walnut branch running up the inside of my forearm... the compound leaves fanning out the way they do in high summer here in our backyard... and standing beside the lowest of them, a plain cross. Anyone who has read much of what I write knows I did not choose this arbitrarily.

You can stand on the bank at Lawson’s Fork here in Spartanburg and watch water become air, the vapor lifting where the current slows over rocks, thinning as the light strengthens, and then gone quickly in a hot July morning. The ancient Hebrew has a term for what the eye is doing there. It’s the word the book we have mistranslated for four centuries sets at its own head, הֶבֶל, …

Edith in Breslau from Wikitree A photograph of Edith Stein, taken around 1920, has become very meaningful to me. She's not a Catholic, a Carmelite, or the woman the Church will canonize as Teresia Benedicta a Cruce. She's a philosopher in her late twenties who has already written the most careful phenomenological study of empathy, who has already been told, in ways both polite and structural, that the university has no chair for her.

Heckuva job by the Hub City Spartanburgers team on this Duncan Park stadium giveaway tonight to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Duncan Park (also same year our home was built just down the street) at the game. So well done! So much history for our community and neighborhood!

As I've been working on my PhD Comprehensive Exams this summer, I've been frequently asking myself what it is I’m actually trying to write. That sounds like the sort of question I should have answered a long time ago, especially after years of blogging, teaching, preaching, consulting, podcasting, and now reading for a PhD in ecology, spirituality, and religion. But the truth is that sometimes you only recognize the shape of your work after you’ve been doing it for a while (which I often said to my middle and high school students as they journeyed).

Left the local plant store excited about planting my new Cherry tree on Fathers’ Day but realized (after digging a hole) that I’d come home with a Crabapple. That’ll do as well. Malus angustifolia (Narrowleaf Crab, Narrowleaf Crabapple, Southern Crabapple, Wild Crab, Wild Crabapple) | North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox: The native Southern crabapple is a shrub or small tree, 20 to 30 feet in height.

The twelve verses about the Magi in Matthew do not invite final answers; they invite attention, patience, and the persistence to keep digging.

I grew up Southern Baptist and am still a Baptist (and an ordained one at that!). My ordination certificate hangs next to my desk here and was signed by two incredible women who were leaders in the church that ordained me after seminary. Thank goodness for the folks at BWIM for constantly doing the work they do as the SBC continues down the path of politicization, misguided reformed theologies, and “christian nationalism”…

Just a short note to say that I’m very excited to share that I’ve finished up my coursework towards my PhD at CIIS and advancing into my two comprehensive exams. Once those are completed (hopefully by the end of the year), I’ll be in full dissertation mode. Exciting!

Twenty years ago (2006), my first book, Asia Has Claims Upon New England: Assyrian Reliefs at Yale, was published by Yale University after my time there as a graduate student working at the Yale University Art Gallery. It's a short study of how carved stones from the palace of Assurnasirpal II at Nimrud came to New Haven and entered the religious, educational, and institutional imagination of nineteenth-century America.

By mid-May in Spartanburg, the world can seem to have forgiven us.

Ecological Intentionality and the Metaphysics of Living Form continues my ongoing work at the intersection of phenomenology, ecological theology, and process-oriented metaphysics. Beginning with sustained attention to the black walnut tree in our backyard here in Spartanburg, this paper asks whether non-human organisms can be understood as bearers of interiority rather than as merely complex mechanisms. Drawing on Henri Bergson’s account of duration, Raymond Ruyer’s theory of absolute survey, Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of embodiment and flesh, I work to develop “

On chainsaws, perception, and the quiet disappearance of neighborhood trees

We’re going to see so much of this in the coming years as NISAR develops more standard models... One of the planet’s biggest cities is sinking so rapidly it’s visible from space | CNN: Between October 2025 and January 2026, during Mexico City’s dry season, NISAR mapped the movement of the ground beneath the city. Its findings reveal that parts of the city are sinking at a rate of around 0.8 inches a month — that’s more than 9.5 inches every year. Areas most affected include the Benito Juarez International Airport, the city’s primary airport.

The paper is called "Attention as Ecological Practice: AI Data Centers and the Limits of the Anthropocene," and it starts close to home... literally. A $2.8 billion computing facility is going up on South Pine Street in Spartanburg, in the shell of an old Kohler plant. A few miles away, a different $3 billion proposal, Project Spero, named after South Carolina's state motto, drew hundreds of residents to County Council chambers in opposition before the developer withdrew.

Finished up on my last day of PhD coursework yesterday and heading into comprehensive exams this summer. It's been an amazing adventure and I'm grateful to the incredible profs, students, and colleagues at CIIS. But whew!

I taught AP Physics and Physics and Physical Science (along with Environmental Science, Life Science, and Earth & Space Science) for almost twenty years. I'd introduce the field concept early in the course, and everything that notion seems to clarify. The gravitational field, the electromagnetic field, the wave collapse, and wave functions, etc., all work better as long as you have a playing field.

There is a moment (you've had it, I've had it) when you stop in the middle of something like a walk and feel, with a certainty that precedes any argument, that something is happening in the organism a few feet away from you. Not that it is moving, or making noise, or occupying space in a way that catches your eye.

I wish more people in the United States would read the Bible earnestly. Trump reading 2 Chronicles 7:14 is certainly a take (as is doing this performative political experience at the Museum of the Bible)... Trump Will Participate in a Marathon Bible Reading - The New York Times: America Reads the Bible will run from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.

My teacher / friend / kin / Juglans nigra I have been intently watching the black walnut in our backyard for just over a year, and I am still not sure I know what it is doing. That sentence probably sounds strange. We have words for what trees do, from photosynthesis and transpiration to allelopathy and mast production, and the black walnut is particularly well-documented in this regard.

DuPont State Forest and what the falls teach us about attention

I was fortunate to study Beethoven (my favorite) and Mozart in Vienna and Salzburg during my Sophomore year at Wofford College. That experience changed the way I live, my view of music and history, and my trajectory. Fascinating little vignette into Mozart’s life here... Mozart Wouldn’t Be Mozart Without These Three Objects - The New York Times: The exhibition and its accompanying catalog cover the composer’s entire life and legacy, but much of it is devoted to his foundational years in Salzburg, with objects that collectively illustrate how a boy of seemingly miraculous talent became the Mozart we know today. Here are three of those artifacts.

I’m taking The Great Turning course with Prof. Kelly at CIIS now as part of my PhD studies, and thought I’d share this incredible reflection on the life and work of Joanna Macy who co-taught the course with him and continues to have ripples of impact even though she’s passed over (and who many of us look to now as one of the guiding Ancestors even if we were never in her physical presence)...

I linked to a recent piece this week that highlighted the growing popularity of an open-source project called Edict, built on the ancient Chinese “Three Departments and Six Ministries” model. Instead of imagining AI agents as a kind of flat group chat where everyone talks at once and somehow arrives at a solution, these developers have looked to imperial bureaucracy for inspiration.

We need to change our perception with ecological intentionality... Western U.S. heat wave is historic. Here's what scientists say: In the modern era of routine weather balloon measurements, which stretches back to the 1940s, no March heat wave comes close to what unfolded across the Southwest this week, Schumacher said. Earlier March heat waves did occur, including significant events in 1907 and 1910, but neither appears to match this one in strength or duration.

There is No Tech Cloud: Data Centers and the Land Beneath Them

Maybe we should be looking to soil and microbial networks for our multi-agentic frameworks rather than human constructed (and flawed) org charts... OpenClaw Emperors - by JingYu - ChinaTalk: This brings us to one of the most fascinating phenomena currently tearing up the developer ecosystem: the wildly popular open-source project on GitHub known as “Edict” (三省六部). While developers have spent the last year building Multi-Agent frameworks (like AutoGen or CrewAI) based on the principles of Silicon Valley flat hierarchies —throwing five AI agents into a “group chat” to brainstorm and hoping for the best — a community of Chinese developers took a radically different approach.

There is a black walnut tree in the backyard of our house here in Spartanburg. Every September, it drops its fruit, and the thick green husks split open, staining the ground (and the fingers of our children) dark. The squirrels know the timing better than we do. The tree has been doing this longer than anyone on the street has been alive.

I've always wondered how squirrels experience time. Is time an essential expression of the universe or emergent from other factors? What about whales or black walnut trees? Microbes or orchids? I came across a fascinating article/podcast about how elephants might experience time last night. The discussion of research by Khatijah Rahmat, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, explores what she calls “elephant temporality.” …