Here's Thinking Religion 175 with Matthew Klippenstein on the book of Lamentations and modern contexts to consider here in the United States. Challenging but fun episode! Summary Sam Harrelson, host of the Thinking Religion podcast, and Matthew Klippenstein, an engineer, discussed the Book of Lamentations and its connection to current US events, such as the killing of Renee Good in Minnesota, noting the resulting anger mirrors the trauma of conquest or occupation addressed in Lamentations.

Summary Sam Harrelson, host of the Thinking Religion podcast, and Matthew Klippenstein, an engineer, discussed the Book of Lamentations and its connection to current US events, such as the killing of Renee Good in Minnesota, noting the resulting anger mirrors the trauma of conquest or occupation addressed in Lamentations. They explored the historical context of Lamentations as something liminal before post-catastrophe "reconstruction theology" following the Babylonian conquest around 587 BCE, and discussed scholarly challenges to biblical authorship, including the traditional attribution of Lamentations to Jeremiah.

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.

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.

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.

I'm taking a course on Hegel this semester at CIIS with Prof. Matt Segall (who writes an excellent Substack newsletter) as I wrap up my PhD coursework, so I thought what better time to finally do a deep dive into Schelling, as I have a deficiency in his work and need to understand it more precisely (or at least attempt to).

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.

Over the past year, I’ve been tracking a question that began with a simple observation: Artificial intelligence isn’t only code or computation, but it’s infrastructure. It eats electricity and water. It sits on land. It reshapes local economies and local ecologies. It arrives through planning commissions and energy grids rather than through philosophical conference rooms. That observation was the starting point of my November 2025 piece, “

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.

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.

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.

Fun read here for fans of science fiction like myself... Among the Prophets | Nicholas Russell: For the past few months, I’ve been researching how science fiction has been used as a guide for predicting the future. This has included reading interviews and speeches, the testimony of would-be prophets. Naturally, certain quotes pop up like weeds—but, in the case of the more platitudinal selections, no one can seem to agree on who actually said them.

I’ve been following conversations around UAPs and “high strangeness” with a mix of fascination and caution for a few years now. Part of that comes from my work in and around academic consciousness studies, particularly where ecology, perception, and meaning intersect. Part of it comes from being an ordained pastor with a Masters from Yale in ancient religious literature who has spent 30+ years reading and academically studying ancient religious texts (mainly Ancient Near Eastern as well as Jewish, Greek, and Christian) that modern people often misunderstand as either naïve or hysterical.

This is a little self-indulgent, but I wanted to share some of the interesting stats from my blog in 2025. I was rather surprised to see the site have one its "best" year (numbers-wise with page views, likes, and comments... I won't apply that label to my own content) since 2016 and reaching levels it was hitting at the height of blogging on the web in the mid 2000's (though I do think we're seeing a return to blog culture as more people realize the attention engines of social media are turning us all into wretched creatures).

Yale Div's Christian Wiman’s recent essay in Harper’s, “The Tune of Things,” arrives quietly and then stays. A family member sent it over this week, and I was embarrassed that I hadn't read it yet, given how closely it moves with my own ideas I'm working on with Ecology of the Cross in my PhD work in Religion and Ecology at CIIS.

I have a hunch mathematical thinking goes waaaayyy back into our human (and more-than-human) ancestry... Ancient Pottery Shows Humans Were Doing Math 3,000 Years Before Numbers Existed - The Debrief: Long before humans carved numbers into clay tablets or scratched equations onto stone, people in the ancient Near East were already dividing space, counting patterns, and thinking in mathematical sequences—without ever writing a single numeral. Evidence for this surprisingly prehistoric mathematical thinking doesn’t come from proto-calculators or tally sticks, but from something far more familiar: pottery.

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, …

Here's our annual family letter, which we send out during Christmastide. I want to add that I thank each and every one of you who subscribe to my blog. I've been posting intermittently since around 2003. Over the past year, views and engagement have grown exponentially, and this is by far the biggest year I've ever seen in terms of numbers (will post numbers shortly) as I continue my PhD studies in Ecology and Religion.

My former students and those who know me well know that I love squirrels. I had two pet squirrels (Chip and Dale) throughout my childhood after we found their fallen nest in the Hurricane Hugo cleanup at our home in rural South Carolina. They lived a long and happy life inside (my Mom and Dad were beyond understanding to say the least), and were mostly tame as squirrels go (though now I would caution anyone about trying to domesticate eastern grey squirrels even from an infant stage!).

Worthy read on Elon’s post-scarcity fantasy of robots and AGI that relies on the concepts of Superintelligence and trans-humanistic ethics that lack any concept of ecological futures and considerations… a future that, quite frankly, we should not pursue if we are to live into our true being here on this planet. Elon Musk drops 'sustainable' from Tesla's mission as he completes his villain arc | Electrek…

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…

Kind of fun getting Beyond Good and Evil for Christmas from Santa in 2025… Merry Christmas 🎄!

I have grave concerns about the speed at which this is happening all over the state, with little regard to integral ecologies (City Council is debating two new data centers here in Spartanburg as well)... 9 new data centers proposed in Colleton County: “I think South Carolina really is at a decision point: what do we want our state to look like 20 years from now, 30 years from now?” resident and Climate Campaign Associate Robby Maynor said.

Exciting news for Merianna and our family… so proud of her ministry and devotion to the spiritual direction of people (young and old!)... Announcing our New Director of Youth and Family Ministry: Dear FPC Youth, Families, and Congregation, The Youth Director Search Committee is overjoyed to announce that Rev. Merianna Neely Harrelson has accepted the call to serve as our new Director of Youth and Family Ministry.