As the villagers of Pudukudi Melur showed in their moment of radical hospitality, true freedom is not about protecting one’s rights or maintaining boundaries; it is about breaking them open in love.
I started capturing scenes of weather around my house with my phone. This eventually spiraled into creating a video essay with music and a voice-over of the central sections of the paper.
Sylvia Wynter’s fiction invites us to think the secular and the religious together in order to open new “continents of the spirit” and new “planets of the imagination.”
Mt. Carmel represents a very particular vision of Divine power, one dependent on a definition of power that equates it entirely with the strength to impose one’s will on another – even to the point of death. It’s an astonishing demonstration, yet also an extremist one, requiring power to equal unfathomable force: the unquenchable fire and Elijah’s subsequent unquenchable thirst to eliminate his enemies.
“Happy Little Accidents” also approaches philosophy as a practice of creating scenes of desire, staging a vision of a future, a way of being, a mode of relation – as attractive and worthy.
What would it mean to pursue, or even practice, the un-representable? How does the unruliness of the demonic differ from the unruliness that sovereign Man has always been able to claim as a special right, in the name of order and protection?
Faith in God must always be lived out through care and love for one’s neighbors.
But academics usually wish for more. We fantasize about some audience scattered in the future who will not just read what we write but do something with it, who will see and feel that our words and ideas carry an energy or force that calls for more to be said, more to be thought, more to be created, even if it is critical.
While Sylvia Wynter is not a scholar of religion, religion plays a significant role in her thinking, offering important lessons for political theology.
The picture painted here, especially by the verses of the Psalm not included in the lectionary reading (Psalm 104:1-23) is an astonishing vision of the ubiquity of the Creator within their creation, directly immersed within the moment-by-moment dance of life in its most intimate, even quotidian – eating, drinking, growing, building, nesting: these are the tasks of home and family. Divine empathy for daily life, in its glorious diversity, for everything that is alive.
Regardless of whether we live in the shadow of volcanoes or glaciers, we can see and know that God is at work in the awesome and majestic unfolding of creation. The same divine sovereignty that moves mountains can move human hearts toward the kin-dom—if we have eyes to see and courage to act.
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