Multiverse Minutiae

The Cosmic Christ  Studying the chaos to cosmos theme from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22 is a fascinating journey. It deepens our understanding of the original creation and the coming new creation. But it also makes us aware of God’s sovereignty over chaos: his turning chaos into cosmos (or micro-cosmos). His intent is to restore his creation to the cosmos he intended it to be in the beginning. Instead of fall and redemption, creation centered spirituality focuses on New Humanity as co-creators.    For Paul Tillich, “God” is the symbol of the infinite ground and power of being and meaning. God is the source of our courage to be as the power that transcends the threat of nonbeing. This courage to be is “rooted in the personal, total, and immediate certainty of divine forgiveness.”  God is the source of courage precisely because God also embraces nonbeing in Godself and thus eternally conquers it. In the dynamics of the triune life, the ‘Father’ is understood as the abyss...

Democratic Socialism   Nicos Poulantzas tried to envision how the left could simultaneously champion rank-and-file democracy at a distance from the state and push for radical transformation from within it. Working within the state would aim to produce “breaks” that would polarize the highly conflictual state apparatuses toward the working class, assisted by external pressure from rank-and-file organizations. “It is not simply a matter of entering state institutions in order to use their characteristic levers for a good purpose,” Poulantzas wrote. “In addition struggle must always express itself in the development of popular movements, the mushrooming of democratic organs at the base, and the rise of centers of self-management.” Anarcho-Communism  Ricardo Flores Magón’s concept of revolution was based on the idea that Mexican workers on both sides of the border had the potential to be the instruments of transformation through their own self-activity. By the outbreak of the Mexi...

Laboratories of Municipal Law: Case Studies in Technological Innovation and Environmental Protection     Cities are the new laboratories of democracy and it is important to utilize municipal law to empower municipalities as hubs of technological innovation and environmental protection. As sites of political innovation, cities have been locations of experiments in policy as well as invigorators of civic life. From an international law perspective, cities have become part of the cast of non-state actors. Yet they remain governmental actors that are forming cross-networks for greater collaboration and new exercises of power relationships. These cities are thus the locus of a new cosmopolitan citizenship divergent from the Westphalian nation-state. This is what is meant by the political innovation of the “right to the city.”  In the context of the United States, municipal home rule is the doctrine by which cities are granted local autonomy and some degree of independence from...

We no longer fully appreciate how essential urban squares (plazas) are for facilitating a civilized exchange of opinions and divergent points of view. This was, indeed, the essence of the ancient Greek agora, crucible of democracy. It was, “the constant resort of all citizens, and it did not spring to life on special occasions but was the daily scene of social life, business and politics.” It was a combination of marketplace and park, a center for teaching and for gossip, for recreation and for religion, for entertainment and for public demonstrations. The Greeks were proud of the public dialogue on the agora, and attributed to it their unique, democratic form of government. As Thucydides said: “Our citizens attend both to public and private duties, and do not allow absorption in their own various affairs to interfere with their knowledge of the city’s. We … decide or debate, carefully and in person, all matters of policy, holding, not that words and deeds go ill together, but that act...

As we co-create the post-modern era, we will need to simultaneously adjust our practices to align with ecological principles and planetary boundaries while also putting our technological endeavors into hyperdrive in order to solve our many crises. This is the metamodern paradox. Capitalism is yet another metanarrative in need of deconstruction. This metanarrative will not serve us to these ends described. In terms of micropolitics, a series of microrevolutions can cascade to form the basis of a counter hegemony to the totalitization of capitalist realism.  Modernization has been carried forward by enthusiastic overcoming of tradition and a confident subordination of nature by science and technology. Beck’s disorienting realization was that those very same energies, those same tools were now the source not only of our emancipation but also of our self-endangerment. To retreat would be to put the gains of modernization at risk. We could not deny the benefits of modernization. But nor...

Russian cosmism is a philosophical and cultural movement     that emerged in Russia at the turn of the 19th century, and again, at the beginning of the 20th century.   Russian Cosmism, is a highly controversial and oxymoronic blend of activist speculation, futuristic traditionalism, religious science, exoteric esotericism, utopian pragmatism, idealistic materialism-higher magic partnered to higher mathematics.  Main themes in Russian Cosmist thought include the active human role in human and cosmic evolution; the creation of new life forms, including a new level of humanity; the unlimited extension of human longevity to a state of practical immortality; the physical resurrection of the dead; serious scientific research into matters long considered subjects fit only for science fiction, occult, and esoteric literature; the exploration and colonization ofthe entire cosmos; the emergence on our biosphere of a new sphere of human thought called the "noosphere"; and other...