Derrida; Divine Essence, and Mary Oliver
Good week SW readers!
You may have noticed that I didn’t send out a newsletter last week. That’s because I have some news: I have been hired to edit a new book being written by the wonderful Zen teacher Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison, who co-founded the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care with his husband Chodo Robert Campbell. We are having a lot of fun with this project, which is a contemporary exploration of the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism. As a result of the increased workload I will be sending out Strange Wonder every second week throughout 2021.
That said, I hope you enjoy the offerings this week:
What I’m Writing
A revised Spinoza essay: Spinoza In Plain English pt 10a: The Essence of God
What is the essence of a thing? What is the essence of God? How are they related?
What I’m Reading
Who was Jacques Derrida, and why does it matter?
Loved and hated, Derrida remade global philosophy and spawned a million bad university philosophy papers and art installations. There are still things to learn from him today, and this essay helps us to see what is profoundly useful in his legacy.
Feminism and mass incarceration: a bold and incisive essay by a female attorney asks if feminists have unwittingly allied themselves with punitive justice and mass incarceration. As as someone skeptical of prisons as social solutions, I found this essay raises important questions.
Rethinking Rousseau: Rousseau challenged ideals of education and helped inspire radical new models of how children should learn (models which may be based on the distant past). Do we have more to learn from him?
AOBAG
Summer time is a good time for Mary Oliver: Poet of A Different Dissidence (May 2018)