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If Relation Goes All the Way Down

​ A curious thing happens when physicists begin sounding like metaphysicians. In a recent New Scientist review of Carlo Rovelli’s On the Equality of All Things: Physics and Philosophy , Karmela Padavic-Callaghan describes a world that seems almost designed to attract the attention of a process theologian. Rovelli argues that the revolution accomplished by quantum physics has not yet been fully absorbed by philosophy. Physics has changed its picture of reality more radically than many of our inherited philosophical categories acknowledge. There is, on Rovelli’s account, no fundamental world of little self-contained things sitting in space and moving through time. At the deepest level are processes, interactions, relations. Space and time themselves belong to the world that emerges from these relations rather than providing the container in which they occur. Anyone who has spent time with Alfred North Whitehead may feel the temptation to smile. Whitehead spent much of the first half...
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The Grace of Being Wrong.

Public life has lately offered a familiar spectacle: leaders making sweeping claims, supporters defending them, and facts becoming secondary to loyalty. Commentators have examined this dynamic not only for what it reveals about politics but also for what it reveals about us. Why can acknowledging a leader’s error feel like acknowledging our own? The longer we have defended a position, the more expensive changing our minds becomes. We have argued with friends. We have spoken publicly. We have defended people whose behavior made us uncomfortable. Perhaps relationships have been strained or broken. Eventually we are no longer reconsidering a proposition. We are reconsidering ourselves. People often rationalize their decisions rather than endure the discomfort of saying, “I was wrong.” Political identity intensifies the difficulty when changing one’s mind also seems to vindicate people one has regarded as opponents. Christians recognize the problem. We have another name for the practic...
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​When a Kingdom Forgets Itself: Part Five

Earlier, I suggested that Homer invites us to judge a civilization by what happens at its thresholds. Now the lens narrows. We return to Ithaca. The kingdom appears unchanged. The palace still stands. The fields are still cultivated. The servants continue their work. The forms of public life remain in place. But the reader knows that something is profoundly wrong. The absence of Odysseus has created more than a political vacuum. It has revealed a moral one. The suitors have occupied the palace, but they have done something even more destructive than seizing another man’s house. They have forgotten what a house is for. In Homer’s world, a household is not merely private property. It is where guests are welcomed, justice is practiced, children are formed, and obligations are honored. The household is the smallest school of civilization. The suitors consume it instead. They feast without gratitude. They compete without honor. They mock restraint. They turn hospitality into entit...
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