process musings

blog

From NPR – American Lives: James Baldwin, ‘Lifting The Veil’

Posted on May 16, 2013

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129281259

This is an excerpt from NPR’s story on James Baldwin.  I have been been intrigued by Baldwin.  His writing lures me.

James Baldwin“The writer James Baldwin once made a scathing comment about his fellow Americans: “It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.”

As an openly gay, African-American writer living through the battle for civil rights, Baldwin had reason to be afraid — and yet, he wasn’t. A television interviewer once asked Baldwin to describe the challenges he faced starting his career as “a black, impoverished homosexual,” to which Baldwin laughed and replied: “I thought I’d hit the jackpot.”

Several of Baldwin’s essays, speeches and articles are collected in a new book called The Cross of Redemption. Randall Kenan, who edited the collection, talks to NPR’s Steve Inskeep about Baldwin’s complicated identity — and how his work challenged black and white readers alike.”

Living continuity is something that matters, an important aspect of our experience.  But the way it matters is not a given on which we would be authorized to lean, in order to organize everything else.  In other words, the task of philosophy is to interpret common sense, not to follow any commonsensical claim in particular, because as soon as it is given doctrinal authority it will lead to the repression of other commonsensical claims.

~Isabelle Stengers, “Thinking with Deleuze and Whitehead” in Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections, 37-8.

World Religions: the Ajivika Sect

Posted on February 7, 2013

One great aspect about attending Claremont Lincoln University is their commitment to global peace building.  This is accomplished by joining people from all religions, and share in dialogue, speaking on current issues, theology, etc.

I am currently taking a course on Jainism philosophy and ecology, and one of the projects was to briefly write a half-page synopsis of a given Indian group/sect.  I was given the Ajivika sect.  The research was interesting, and I thought I would share it with you.  At the end I will also provide additional sites to further inquire about this particular sect.

Continue Reading

The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’  only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’’s mouths, in other people’’s contexts, serving other people’’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own.

Orientalism and Religion, Richard King, p. 112

Posted on February 3, 2013

“The logic of comparison – which is, on the face of it, concerned with difference – functions rather as a logic of identity , in which the Indian subject does not enjoy independent status, and is made intelligible only in opposition to the fundamental or privileged values of Western modernity … In the hegemonic discourse of modernity and liberalism, the Western subject has been conceived as an individuated self-conscious authorial presence (the ‘author’ of his own activities) … [T]he ‘Indian’ is not simply different from the ‘W esterner’, but is his exact inverse.”

Critique of western Judaeo Christian tradition on Hinduism
Orientalism and Religion by Richard King

http://www.amazon.com/Orientalism-Religion-Post-Colonial-Theory-Mystic/dp/0415202582

Horizontal-izing the Vertical, Eradicating the Extremes: Scales of Value

Posted on February 1, 2013

When we think we think in bifurcations.  Up/down.  Left/right.  Right/wrong.  This way of thinking causes either/or mentality.  It indicates that one is right, and the other is wrong.

But what would happen if we flatten it out?  We make what is vertical thinking horizontal?  What if we said that in order to have one, you need the other?  That it is relationally intertwined so that if one does not exist, the other does not?

Now what if we got rid of the extremes altogether?  Instead of right and wrong, just or unjust, we have scales of lesser or greater value.  You see, what is absolutely right, absolutely wrong?  When we incorporate culture, education, values, race, class, etc., etc., all the categories (if we can break ourselves down to categories), or better yet, when we know ourselves, we develop values that shape our world.

Continue Reading

Older Posts