Over at Salon, Steve Paulson writes about biologist Stuart Kauffman’s new approach to God in his recent book, “Reinventing the Sacred”.

[Kauffman] seeks to formulate a new scientific worldview and, in the process, reclaim God for nonbelievers. Kauffman argues that our modern scientific paradigm — reductionism — breaks down once we try to explain biology and human culture. And this has left us flailing in a sea of meaninglessness. So how do we steer clear of this empty void? By embracing the “ceaseless creativity” of nature itself, which in Kauffman’s view is the real meaning of God. It’s God without any supernatural tricks.

He goes on to poke holes in the reductionist, or flatland approach, as Ken Wilber has spent so many pages doing.

It’s comforting in that the entire universe is seen to be lawful; we can understand everything, from societies to quarks. Yet a number of physicists, including Nobel laureates Philip Anderson and Robert Laughlin, feel that reductionism is not adequate to understand the real world. In its place, they talk about “emergence.” I think they’re right.

Here’s where it gets a little sticky for me. With all due respect for Dr. Kauffman and his attempts to realign spirituality into something more relevant, I worry that he’s confusing the Universe’s creativity with creativity’s source. That source, or Source, literally has “no thing” to it, and yet it gives birth to “some thing” in every moment. The agentic value of all somethings isn’t deniable, nor is agency separate from the Source. But agency isn’t God. The Source of agency, on the other hand, gets us closer to the substrate of all things that spontaneously bridges Itself with and into all things as a divine and messy creativity… in each moment.

Bows to Andrew Sullivan for the heads up.

Who are you… really?

Bows to the WorstHorse for this one.

Here’s a podcast from InfiniteSmile.

Over at the Huffington Post, Perry Garfinkel writes:

A Buddhist teacher friend of mine calls his brand Buddhism Lite, and I agreed when I first saw Thich Nhat Hanh address a packed auditorium at Berkeley High School in California in 1988. His simple message and his demure persona convinced me that this guy was never going to catch on in the West.

Little did I know.

I was at the Berkeley Community Theater that same night with my girlfriend at the time as well as some pals from the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center. I was taken with how calm the evening was as well as how relevant his approach to the Dharma seemed to be. Still seems that way.

Bows to Jonathan Doherty for this one.

Over at the Huffington Post, Deepak Chopra brings up interesting points when it comes to public presidential piety (just try to say that bit of alliteration quickly).

Money quote:

…if Obama went to a different church every week, with the intention of healing the wounds of divisiveness, he’d be extending the message he was elected on.