some deeply-valued empathy for religious minds

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I wouldn't say I have a religious mind—a spiritual mind, yes—but I am committed to appreciating, as best I can, religious perspectives in contemporary political life (as time allows; it's not a high priority), especially relative to Habermas' interest.

Today, I defended Habermas' openness to religious voices in "the public sphere" against a misreading of his intent in the current issue of Philosophy & Social Criticism, beginning with somewhat expressive reaction to the abstract of the essay before writing today in light of a careful reading of the article.

I’ll eventually transpose those two discussions into a single posting here (or perhaps a Webpage).

some writing on the wall about a holy grail

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Oil and coal—hydrocarbon fuel—is waste of the Earth, which of course takes millions of years to accumulate, and it's not in the human interest to learn to fabricate it, due to greenhouse effects. Yet, we have learned to fabricate nuclear energy, but its waste is not practically disposable, unless we abandon a hundred-mile radius around nuclear waste dumps for about 25,000 years, as we've not yet discovered the holy grail of energy: hydrogen-fusion-produced energy that breeder reactors would generate. But that will happen this century (cost-effectiveness of hydrogen-fuel cells is already within sight); so, a dwindling politics of oil will leave the Arab region to whatever alternative resourcefulness that it has been able to develop in the meantime.

getting beyond “a secular age”

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A notion of a “secular age” is evinced by Charles Taylor's new, monumental book of that title, A Secular Age. But secularity only makes sense relative to religious life, as non-religious or post-religious. From an anthropological perspective, being human precedes religious life, always accompanied it humanistically (I would argue), and may get along quite well without religiosity—with all due graciousness toward the mass of humanity that needed and needs religious life.

a secularization of prophetic calling

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Can religious sensibility grow to love its place in deep time, beyond tangles of theistic vanity?

In one of the postings from a recent Habermas group exchange, “K” briefly renders an argumentation strategy for renewing the integrity of prophetic calling for progressive politics, which I want to dwell with further. None of my comment below was part of the email exchange.

the pressure cooker of China

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The Party in China today seems forced to evolve into a utilitarian technocracy dependent on global collaboration in figuring out how to avoid imploding, otherwise forcing the world economy into extended recession.

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"Hong Kong and the former Portuguese enclave of Macau are the only places in China where people are allowed to commemorate those killed in 1989" (Reuters, May 27).

reason #506 why the extraterrestrials don't reply

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Sunday, May 6, a record 18,000 people took off their clothes to pose for U.S. photographer Spencer Tunick at Mexico City's Zocalo square, the heart of the ancient Aztec empire.

Green multipolitanism(beyond transnationalism)

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"...[D]emocracy itself needs redefinition according to a new transnational ideal...," says the publisher's description of Democracy across Borders: From Dêmos to Dêmoi, by James Bohman, MIT Press, May 2007. In his “Introduction” to the book, Bohman shows how he seeks to establish the conceptual foundations of transnational democracy.

evolution for everyone

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"Of course, even as humans bond together in groups and behave with impressive civility toward their neighbors, they are capable of treating those outside the group with ruthless savagery. [David Sloan] Wilson[, in Evolution for Everyone] is not naïve, and he recognizes the ease with which humans fall into an us-versus-them mind-set. Yet he is a self-described optimist, and he believes that the golden circles of we-ness, the conditions that encourage entities at every stratum of life to stop competing and instead pool their labors into a communally acting mega-entity, can be expanded outward like ripples on a pond until they encompass all of us — that the entire human race can evolve the culturally primed if not genetically settled incentive to see our futures for what they are, inexorably linked on the lone blue planet we share....For their universal appeal and basal power to harmonize a crowd, he recommends more music and dancing and asks, 'Could we establish world peace if everyone at the United Nations showed up in leotards?'”

Natalie Angier, "Sociable Darwinism," New York Times Book Review, April 8, 2007

Our evolutionarity is beyond a universal Darwinism

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Indeed, it's our evolutionarity that gives appeal to the idea of unified theory, due to the evolved and ontogenic character of mind that inquires into "as such" prospects: So many modes of change; so, what is change as such? First, more or less, it was the power of a Sun god, then the oh-so-human Face of The Deep Creating the Heavens, etc. Everything is, so "is" Is, too?. But ultimately, we're beyond the question of "Being," back to the Sun, albeit relative to Earth's "goldilocks" water-hole distance from a star, Gaian depths of Time—geologeny, biologeny, paleoanthropogeny, culturality, history.

leading creativity for facilitating evolution

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Currently and through next Tuesday in downtown San Francisco (amid coincidently beautiful Bay Area weather—so far), the world's largest association of scientists is having its annual conference. This year's theme for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)—its cohering interdisciplinary focus—is "Science & Technology for Sustainable Well-being."

If you believe that the theme is a piece of tired rhetoric, then you don't know the AAAS: the folks who were pushing the issue of global warming long before it became green chic in the mid-'90s.