Arbitrary Marks

I love that my readers are so helpful.  See Jeff Wilson’s comments on my earlier post, to get more insight into Engaged Buddhism.  And remember, if I’m citing expertise on something, for example, Engaged Buddhism, I will try to also include my sources.  In no way am I trying to portray myself as a scholar [...]

Before I put up excerpts of my paper, here’s a brief background on Engaged Buddhism, taken from Christopher Queen’s Engaged Buddhism in the West. Historically, Queen argues that Engaged Buddhism can be considered a fourth "yana" (alongside Hinayana, Mahayana and Vajrayana), termed "Navayana." This term comes from Dr. Ambedkar, who spoke for the [...]

Crisis begins with a view of the White House and the strains of "Dixie" playing in the background. The film covers June 10, 1963, and JFK’s decisions, with his brother RFK (then attorney general) regarding the two students (Vivian Malone and James Hood) entering the University of Alabama, against the will of Governor George [...]

Leiter has some thoughts on Simon Critchley, Derrida, and the Very Short Introduction to Continental Philosophy.  I will be getting my intro from another text.

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I’m back from a couple of hours at Atomix, working up an outline for my paper in my notebook (I’ve finally finished the one I started at UMSL, and am now working through a big, black 8 1/2 by 11 sized bound, unlined book). I thought the name of the coffee shop was philosophically [...]

Fred Dallmayr’s thoughts on East-West philosophical comparisons, taken from AK Ramanujan’s discussion. How I plan to use this in guiding my work.

This week I took an intensive course at Meadville-Lombard Theological Seminary with Sharon Welch, author of A Feminist Ethic of Risk and several other books on postmodern ethics. She’s the new provost at Meadville, formerly the head of the religious studies department at UM-Columbia. I took the class primarily because we were covering [...]

Dru asked me to clarify my epistemological leanings in the last post. I responded that I was torn, although drawn to Donald Davidson and John McDowell, who agree in their critique of Quine, but differ in central ways. Interestingly, although I’m not aiming to study ethics per se, I keep coming back to [...]

Day one and one half of Sharon Welch’s “Postcolonial Comparative Religious Ethics” at Meadville Lombard Seminary in Chicago. A few reflections on the course, in particular, “knowlege.”

In the last post, I said I was "aghast" that the white Democrats used self-defense as justification for their actions against black voters. According to Albert Bandura, however, I shouldn’t be surprised–that’s the way most inhumanities are perpetrated. In his article about just this phenomenon, moral disengagement in perpetrating inhumanities, Bandura uses psychological [...]