“To be quiet in the hands of the marvellous”—an intra-active meditation on part of Ammons’ poem, “Essay on Poetics”
To read this address please click on the following link: “To be quiet in the hands of the marvellous”—an intra-active meditation on part of Ammons’ poem, “Essay on Poetics”
A new-materialist meditation woven around four poems by Lucretius, A. R. Ammons, Joseph Blanco White, and Mary Oliver—‘It is only enough to touch the inner light of each surrounding thing and hope it will itself be stirred to radiance’
To read this address please click on the link below: A new-materialist meditation woven around four poems by Lucretius, A. R. Ammons, Joseph Blanco White, and Mary Oliver—‘It is only enough to touch the inner light of each surrounding thing and hope it will itself be stirred to radiance’
Time will tell—‘It is impossible to think in advance of experience, and no experience is merely empirical’
After a long and challenging week (as I know it will have been for all of you) and having spent an entire day (Saturday) from dawn until dusk writing the following piece I find that, as 9pm approaches, I can no longer tell whether it contains anything more than mere, arrant nonsense. It’s certainly a flawed and […]
A Lucretian Mothering Sunday Meditation
Last year on Mothering Sunday I gave an address called ‘The maternalizing of matter and the materializing of the mother’—A poetic, supreme fiction for our age and, should you wish, you can read it again at the following link: The maternalizing of matter and the materializing of the mother—A poetic, supreme fiction for our age. The Roman poet, Lucretius (c. […]
Facts not fear. Clean hands. Open hearts.—An Epicurean/Lucretian meditation on how to respond to the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic
Lucretius contemplating how nature works Introductory meditation (excluding the Lord’s Prayer) adapted from ‘An Epicurean Gathering’ arranged by me, Lewis Connolly (until recently the minister of the Ipswich Unitarian Meeting House) and Dean Reynolds: The Roman poet Lucretius wrote: In the murk of our darkness, you, Epicurus, raised your blazing lantern to show us the […]
Learning from Lucretius in the shadow of coronavirus
READING: Lines 78-58 from Book VI of the De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) by Lucretius trans. by David R. Slavitt (University of California Press, 2008, pp. 253-254) . . . But people / tend to revert under stress to their earlier superstitions and imagine cruel taskmasters, omnipotent beings we wretches / ought to fear and appease, […]
A few thoughts about the role an ontology of motion and a performative new-materialism plays in my work as minister at the Cambridge Unitarian Church
The park opposite the Cambridge Unitarian Church this morning In recent days I’ve had the opportunity to talk at length with a member of the Unitarian congregation here in Cambridge who is a philosopher with a Junior Research Fellowship at one of the nearby colleges. The conversation we had was both about conversation itself and […]
If anything will level with you water will—a meditation on flows, folds and fields, the material conditions of nature as she appears
Mary C. Durst, Bathing at Hunstanton Cliffs, Norfolk, 1888 READINGS Isaiah 26.4 Trust in the Lord for ever, for in the Lord God you have an everlasting rock. Isaiah 44.8 Do not fear, or be afraid; have I not told you from of old and declared it? You are my witnesses! […]
Not the beginning of a new religion (re-ligio) but its end (de-ligio)?—A new-materialist reading of Pentecost
READINGS: Poem No. XXII in “A Shropshire Lad” by A. E. Housman From far, from eve and morning And yon twelve-winded sky,The stuff of life to knit me Blew hither: here am I. Now—for a breath I tarry Nor yet disperse apart—Take my hand quick and tell me, What have you in your heart. Speak now, […]