Religion of the Enlightenment

 Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic.  By Matthew Stewart.  W.W. Norton, 2014.  Index, notes, 566 pages.  

Naturalism, Deism, Atheism 

Books on Atheism, Agnosticism, Non-Religious, Freethinkers, Humanists

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. By Susan Jacoby.  Holt, 2004.  448 pages. 

Religion in America: Percentage of People Who Are Independent of Religion

Mike' Garofalo's Experiences and Views on Religion

Pragmatism and American History

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.  By Steven Pinker.  Penguin Books, 2018, 576 pages.  VSCL. 

Just Observing in Chrysanthemum Time

mums flowering, 

zinnias seeding--
   just wondering

“Plucking chrysanthemums along the West fence. 
Gazing in silence at the East Cascade foothills. 
The Canada geese flying in formation overhead, 
Through the soft valley air of morning―
In these things there is a deep meaning, 
But when we are about to express it, 
We suddenly forget the words.”  

- My rephrasing of lines from an unknown Chinese poet
from verses found in 'The Wisdom of Insecurity,’ by Alan Watts, 1951.  

A Gardener's Pictorial Memories

The Spirit of Gardening 

"I search and can't find myself. 
I belong in chrysanthemum time, 
Sharp in calla lilly elongations.
God made my soul
Into an ornamental thing."
-  Fernando Pessoa

The Last Second of Summer

The bare branches of an old shrub
Above its fallen scarlet leaves─
Emptiness or forms? 
Chrysanthemums in full bloom
Below clear blue skies─
Forms and emptiness? 

The first second of autumn,
The last second of summer─
Neither Forms nor Emptiness,
The spaces of past time,
The realms of dead minds;
Or, bereft of Space and Time,
The Singularity of the Big Bang Sublime. 
 
-  Mike Garofalo, Autumn Poems
   Mabon, 9/22/2020

   Reading the The Heart Sutra from the Buddhist scriptures.

"If all meanings could be adequately expressed in words, 

the arts of painting and music would not exist."
-  John Dewey

Pragmatism and American Philosophy

"A chrysanthemum by any other name would be easier to spell."
-  William J. Johnston

Haiku Poems by Mike Garofalo

Pulling Onions (Over 888 Quips and Sayings) by Mike Garofalo

New Ways of Explaining Perceptions

What counts as "a perception" or "perceptions?"
These authors argue for an expanded notion of perceptions grounded in our lived human experiences in temporal body-mind frameworks.  

I am studying the following three books:

Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion. By David Ray Griffin. Cornell University Press, 2000, 440 pages. 

The Mind of Charles Hartshorne: A Critical Examination. By Donald Wayne Viney and George W. Shields. Process Century Press, 2020, 584 pages. 

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality, 1927. Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of Edinburgh during the Session 1927-1928.  Published in 1929. Corrected Edition (1978) by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York, Free Press, 1978. Index (pp.355-387), editor's notes (pp.391-413), paperbound, 413 pages. VSCL: I own both the paperback copy and the eBook Kindle copy.

Process Philosophy   My hypertext notebook on the subject.  

Living and Thinking

I have been reading books on American Pragmatism, a biography about William James (1840-1910), and five lectures/essays by William James.  

. 
My current reading includes:

The American Pragmatists.  By Cheryl Misak.  Oxford University Press, 2013.  Index, bibliography, 286 pages.  VSCL.  The thorough and informative summary of key pragmatist thinkers in America. 

Maps of the Mind: Charts and Concepts of the Mind and Its Labyrinths.  By Charles Hampden-Turner.  Collier, 1981, index, 224 pages. VSCL.  An excellent overview of modern theories about our minds, consciousness, and its biological foundation. 

Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living.  By Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn.  University of Notre Dame Press, 2020, index, bibliography, 432 pages.  VSCL.  Hellenistic thinkers applied to modern concerns.  

Genuine Reality: A Life of William James (1840-1910).  By Linda Simon.  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998, index, bibliography, notes, 496 pages.  VSCL. 

Pragmatism, Old And New: Selected Writings  Edited by Susan Haack, with associate editor Robert Lane.  Amherst, New York, Prometheus Books, 2006.  Glossary, index, 741 pages.  Subjects:  Pragmatism, Philosophy, Neopragmatism, American Philosophy, Philosophy of Language, Belief, Usefulness, Action.  VSCL.  Includes five essays/lectures by William James.  

Pragmatism and American Philosophy

Epicureanism

How to Life a Good Life: Advice From Wise Persons

Gardening and Environmental Awareness

 "Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening.  A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world.  He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.  The food he grows will be fresher, more nutritious, less contaminated by poisons and preservatives and dyes that what he can buy in a store.  He is reducing the trash problem; a garden is not a disposable container, and it will digest and reuse its own wastes.  If he enjoys working in his garden, then he is less dependent on an automobile or merchant for his pleasure.  He is involving himself directly in the work of feeding people. 

A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has set his mind decisively against what is wrong with us.  He is helping himself in a way that dignifies him and that is rich in meaning and pleasure.  But he is doing something else that is more important: he is making vital contact with the soil and the weather on which his life depends.  He will no longer look upon rain as a traffic impediment, or upon the sun as a holiday decoration.  And his sense of humanity's dependence on the world will have grown precise enough, one would hope, to be politically clarifying and useful."
-  Wendell Berry, "The World-Ending Fire", p. 55

Inspired by the 10,000 Things

 "Science and psychoanalysis apart, the most profound development in thought since Nietzsche, as far as we are concerned, is the phenomenological approach to the world.  Mallarmé sought "words without wrinkles," Baudelaire cherished his minutes heureuses and Valéry his "small worlds of order," as we have seen: Checkhov concentrated on the "concrete individual" and preferred "small scale and practical answers," Gide though the "systematizing is denaturing, distorting and impoverishing."  For Oliver Wendell Holmes, "all the pleasure of life is in general ideas, but all the use of life is in specific solutions."  Wallace Stevens considered that we are "better satisfied in particulars."  Thomas Nagel put it in this way: "Particulars things can have a noncompetitive completeness which is transparent to all aspects of the self.  This also helps to explain what the experience of great beauty tends to unify the self: the object engages us immediately and totally in a way that makes distinctions among points of view irrelevant."  Or, as Robert Nozick, who counseled us to make ourselves "vehicles" for beauty, said: "this is what poets and artists bring us―the immense and unsuspected reality of a small thing.  Everything has its own patient entityhood."  George Levine call for "a profound attention to the details of this world."  

-  Peter Watson, "The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God," p.536

"The idea of one overbearing truth is exhausted."  
- Thomas Mann, translated by James Wood  

"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."
-  Albert Einstein

"To study the self is to forget the self.  To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things."
-  Zen Master Dogen

"The more we understand individual things, the more we understand God."
-  Benedict De Spinoza

"God is in the details."
-  Mies Van Der Rohe

"After appreciating and understanding thousands of the details, a common variety God or Goddess is really superfluous."
-  Mike Garofalo

"Caress the detail, the divine detail." 
-  Vladimir Nabokov

"Details are all there are."
-  Maezumi Roshi

"We think in generalities, but we live in details."
-  W.H. Auden

Gardening and Spirituality

Gardening and Religion   

Pragmatism and American Philosophy

Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results: Atomic Habits

American Philosophy

I have been reading many books about American intellectual history, American philosophy, ethics, contemporary issues, general U.S. history, biographies of American thinkers, Native Americans, values, etc.  Here are a few of these books:

The American Pragmatists.  By Cheryl Misak, Ph.D.  The Oxford History of Philosophy.  Oxford University Press, 2015, 1st Edition, 304 pages.  VSCL. 

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.  By Robin Wall Kimmerer.  Milkweed Editions, 2013, 390 pages.  

How to be an Epicurean: The Ancient Art of Living Well.  By Catherine Wilson, Ph.D.  New York, Basic Books, 2019.  293 pages, notes.  VSCL. 

Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are.  By John Kaag, Farrar Straus, 2018.  VSCL.   

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays.  By Joan Didion, 1968.  1960's California.  VSCL.   

Here are some of my hypertext notebooks on related subjects:

Epircureanism

How to Live a Good Life: Advice from Wise Persons

Virtues  

Native Americans of the Northwest   

Walking