Aha! Your quoting Ecclestone has made my day - and given me the kick up the backside needed to read your latest, which I recently took delivery of. Fascinated by the use of underused churches becoming lifehouses - I might spread that idea around my network, thanks.
Great stuff! My mum gave me a copy of Gather the Fragments when I was at university. If I remember right – and she may pop up here to correct me! – she'd known Jim Cotter, who edited it, so that was how she met the book. I went through phases of reading it daily and my copy bears signs of damage from being in the passenger footwell of the car in which a friend and I drove non-stop from Oregon to Mississippi in two days, arriving on 10 September 2001. Anyway, it's come to mind a few times in recent weeks, so today I tracked it down on the shelves. I think it's time to return it to my bedside table.
I just wrote something similar in private to what is proposed in Lifehouse. It’s amazing how these places of worship and churches are everywhere and in our neighborhoods. I live two doors down from one myself. A tool library seems perfect. Charging stations, wonderful. Water purification center, marvelous! But I also hope they hold some core of what the church should have been doing all along and that is the men’s and women’s initiation work of Robert Bly, Michael Meade, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Richard Rohr, Marion Woodman, Martin Shaw, Sophie Strand, etc. As it is a public good this work needs to be provided as close to free as possible.
My interpretation of Lifehouse was Art Church. Where the former congregations of these spiritual centers would also be turned into digital art galleries so that they would be a place of contemplation and inexpensively bring world class art into our less mobile local communities and not just in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, etc.
Thank you, I look forward to reading the rest of Adam’s piece and your new book when I can pry it away from my partner.
Thanks for that, Shagbark, it does seem a useful connection to make. I remember reading Rich Bartlett's initial Microsolidarity posts and finding a lot of resonance, but it's time I caught up with what has grown out of that work. And I suspect it would be interesting to take the LifeHouse ideas into conversation with folks involved.
Dougald, I have just re-read Chapter Five after an over-heated discussion about the place of science in our lives. Questioning science raises all kinds of existential anxieties. Your comment toward the end about science and human judgement put me in mind of Toulmin's Cosmopolis, in which he traces the origins of modern science to the desire for certainty in the face of religious conflicts of C17., and compares the new science with the humanist judgments of people like Montaigne. I have summarised his argument here: https://www.peterreason.net/wp-content/uploads/Handbook_Introduction.pdf. Toulmin, S. (1990). Cosmopolis: The hidden agenda of modernity. New York: Free Press.
Good to hear from you, Peter! And thanks for pointing me towards your summary of the Toulmin book, which I've bumped up against at various points, but not read. It seems there are parallels between the narrative he develops and Iain McGilchrist's telling of the relationship between Renaissance and Enlightenment.
I remember Walter Mignolo cites Cosmopolis, rather critically, in the opening pages of The Darker Side of Western Modernity, and I can see that, from a decolonial perspective, the risk with this kind of argument is that it seeks to rescue a "good modernity" that can be disentangled from a "bad modernity" (which gets pinned on Descartes and co), and this avoids a reckoning with the assumptions shared by both. None of which is to suggest that there aren't things we can and should salvage from within the legacies of modernity.
What you say about the "existential anxieties" raised by questioning science is spot on – and surely related to the elevation of science into an object of belief and a source of "certainty".
I think it completely misreads Toulmin to see him as wanting to disentangle a Good from a Bad modernity. He is tracing the roots of modern science in the quest for certainty in knowledge, hopefully helping us moderns see through the less than rational roots of our worldview.
Apologies, Peter, that was me musing aloud (about a kind of argument), rather than doing justice to either Toulmin or what Mignolo has to say about him. I'll look up his actual comments.
I do think that, more generally, accounts of modernity that focus on different tendencies internal to European intellectual history can generate frustration among thinkers who approach modernity as a project made possible by and inseparable from coloniality, which is where Mignolo is coming from, as are folks such as Esteva and Prakash, Machado de Oliveira, or Blaser and de la Cadena, whose work I draw on in the book. Again, this is a general point about different approaches to analysing modernity, not a specific critique of Toulmin, even if it was Mignolo's reference to Cosmopolis that sparked the connection.
I hope I've made myself a little clearer - and, equally, none of this is to dismiss the helpfulness of this kind of study of the intellectual history of Western European thought and its influence, which surely has a great deal to contribute to how we navigate the business of what we salvage, mourn or take the chance to leave behind as we find our ways out the far side of modernity. So apologies if my initial stream-of-consciousness response came across as more dismissive than intended.
Thanks for getting back to me Dougald. I wanted to make sure my point was understood because I thought your insight about the extent 'science' has taken over from judgment is really important. Toulmin's historical argument suggests this is part of a historical trend, not just something that has happened with Climate Change and Covid. The more I go into it, the more I see that the roots of the current crisis lie way back in the historical roots of western culture. (I was going to write 'human judgment' above, but to be really radical we need to appreciate and learn from the judgement the Land and Earth makes). I hope your book does well beyond the usual suspects!
Thanks, Peter! I think this is a really important thread to trace, recognising how far back these patterns go. (I found myself looking up whether there is an audiobook of Cosmopolis last night – the rhythms of family life, garden tasks, etc mean I do a lot of my reading through the ears rather than the eyes these days! – and to my disappointment, there isn't, but I'll lay hands on a print copy before long.)
Well, yes, it all goes back a long way. Quaker writer Keith Helmuth traces the origins of dualism back to the conflict between Elijah and the priests of Baal--Elijah's victory cements the dualism of a transcendent sole god over the the spirit of Earth. My philosopher colleague Freya Mathews writes of the emergence of theoria in the Greeks:
Through the lens of such discourse. we look at the world and imagine it as spread out passively for our epistemic gaze. We examine it. survey it, map it, reflect upon it in an effort to
work out how its parts and aspects fit together. We construct an abstract simulacrum of reality that re-presents, through the lens of theory, the manifold that initially presents itself to us more immediately, though still passively. through visual perception. (in Invoking the Real)
The more I study this, and now beginning to listen to Indigenous Australian colleagues, I realize how fundamental the revision of our civilization needs to go
Aha! Your quoting Ecclestone has made my day - and given me the kick up the backside needed to read your latest, which I recently took delivery of. Fascinated by the use of underused churches becoming lifehouses - I might spread that idea around my network, thanks.
Great stuff! My mum gave me a copy of Gather the Fragments when I was at university. If I remember right – and she may pop up here to correct me! – she'd known Jim Cotter, who edited it, so that was how she met the book. I went through phases of reading it daily and my copy bears signs of damage from being in the passenger footwell of the car in which a friend and I drove non-stop from Oregon to Mississippi in two days, arriving on 10 September 2001. Anyway, it's come to mind a few times in recent weeks, so today I tracked it down on the shelves. I think it's time to return it to my bedside table.
I just wrote something similar in private to what is proposed in Lifehouse. It’s amazing how these places of worship and churches are everywhere and in our neighborhoods. I live two doors down from one myself. A tool library seems perfect. Charging stations, wonderful. Water purification center, marvelous! But I also hope they hold some core of what the church should have been doing all along and that is the men’s and women’s initiation work of Robert Bly, Michael Meade, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Richard Rohr, Marion Woodman, Martin Shaw, Sophie Strand, etc. As it is a public good this work needs to be provided as close to free as possible.
My interpretation of Lifehouse was Art Church. Where the former congregations of these spiritual centers would also be turned into digital art galleries so that they would be a place of contemplation and inexpensively bring world class art into our less mobile local communities and not just in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, etc.
Thank you, I look forward to reading the rest of Adam’s piece and your new book when I can pry it away from my partner.
A little related something to throw into the mix.
https://www.microsolidarity.cc
Thanks for that, Shagbark, it does seem a useful connection to make. I remember reading Rich Bartlett's initial Microsolidarity posts and finding a lot of resonance, but it's time I caught up with what has grown out of that work. And I suspect it would be interesting to take the LifeHouse ideas into conversation with folks involved.
Dougald, I have just re-read Chapter Five after an over-heated discussion about the place of science in our lives. Questioning science raises all kinds of existential anxieties. Your comment toward the end about science and human judgement put me in mind of Toulmin's Cosmopolis, in which he traces the origins of modern science to the desire for certainty in the face of religious conflicts of C17., and compares the new science with the humanist judgments of people like Montaigne. I have summarised his argument here: https://www.peterreason.net/wp-content/uploads/Handbook_Introduction.pdf. Toulmin, S. (1990). Cosmopolis: The hidden agenda of modernity. New York: Free Press.
Good to hear from you, Peter! And thanks for pointing me towards your summary of the Toulmin book, which I've bumped up against at various points, but not read. It seems there are parallels between the narrative he develops and Iain McGilchrist's telling of the relationship between Renaissance and Enlightenment.
I remember Walter Mignolo cites Cosmopolis, rather critically, in the opening pages of The Darker Side of Western Modernity, and I can see that, from a decolonial perspective, the risk with this kind of argument is that it seeks to rescue a "good modernity" that can be disentangled from a "bad modernity" (which gets pinned on Descartes and co), and this avoids a reckoning with the assumptions shared by both. None of which is to suggest that there aren't things we can and should salvage from within the legacies of modernity.
What you say about the "existential anxieties" raised by questioning science is spot on – and surely related to the elevation of science into an object of belief and a source of "certainty".
I think it completely misreads Toulmin to see him as wanting to disentangle a Good from a Bad modernity. He is tracing the roots of modern science in the quest for certainty in knowledge, hopefully helping us moderns see through the less than rational roots of our worldview.
Apologies, Peter, that was me musing aloud (about a kind of argument), rather than doing justice to either Toulmin or what Mignolo has to say about him. I'll look up his actual comments.
I do think that, more generally, accounts of modernity that focus on different tendencies internal to European intellectual history can generate frustration among thinkers who approach modernity as a project made possible by and inseparable from coloniality, which is where Mignolo is coming from, as are folks such as Esteva and Prakash, Machado de Oliveira, or Blaser and de la Cadena, whose work I draw on in the book. Again, this is a general point about different approaches to analysing modernity, not a specific critique of Toulmin, even if it was Mignolo's reference to Cosmopolis that sparked the connection.
I hope I've made myself a little clearer - and, equally, none of this is to dismiss the helpfulness of this kind of study of the intellectual history of Western European thought and its influence, which surely has a great deal to contribute to how we navigate the business of what we salvage, mourn or take the chance to leave behind as we find our ways out the far side of modernity. So apologies if my initial stream-of-consciousness response came across as more dismissive than intended.
Thanks for getting back to me Dougald. I wanted to make sure my point was understood because I thought your insight about the extent 'science' has taken over from judgment is really important. Toulmin's historical argument suggests this is part of a historical trend, not just something that has happened with Climate Change and Covid. The more I go into it, the more I see that the roots of the current crisis lie way back in the historical roots of western culture. (I was going to write 'human judgment' above, but to be really radical we need to appreciate and learn from the judgement the Land and Earth makes). I hope your book does well beyond the usual suspects!
Thanks, Peter! I think this is a really important thread to trace, recognising how far back these patterns go. (I found myself looking up whether there is an audiobook of Cosmopolis last night – the rhythms of family life, garden tasks, etc mean I do a lot of my reading through the ears rather than the eyes these days! – and to my disappointment, there isn't, but I'll lay hands on a print copy before long.)
Well, yes, it all goes back a long way. Quaker writer Keith Helmuth traces the origins of dualism back to the conflict between Elijah and the priests of Baal--Elijah's victory cements the dualism of a transcendent sole god over the the spirit of Earth. My philosopher colleague Freya Mathews writes of the emergence of theoria in the Greeks:
Through the lens of such discourse. we look at the world and imagine it as spread out passively for our epistemic gaze. We examine it. survey it, map it, reflect upon it in an effort to
work out how its parts and aspects fit together. We construct an abstract simulacrum of reality that re-presents, through the lens of theory, the manifold that initially presents itself to us more immediately, though still passively. through visual perception. (in Invoking the Real)
The more I study this, and now beginning to listen to Indigenous Australian colleagues, I realize how fundamental the revision of our civilization needs to go