Trust assumes empathy, opening to and feeling with the trustworthy other. …. Like trust, with which it is almost synonymous, empathy is ontogenetically and ontologically primal, both the individual historical and the ongoing always present ground of reality as loving communities or co-creative meetings between knowing and known. Reality as a whole and we and all the participants in reality as a whole are continually empathically forming and formed.
Category: Roy Herndon Smith
Living Communities 3: Religion
The understandings of reality as loving communities and of trust as the womb of being are “religious.” A “religion” is a sense of reality as a trustworthy whole. This definition is a variation of the understandings of “religion” a hundred and fifty years of anthropological, social, psychological, historical, and philosophical studies of “religion” have generated. It builds specifically on the Jewish religious thinker Martin Buber’s statement that “religion” is “the whole of human reality” and the psychologist Erik Erikson’s understanding of “religion” as the social institution charged with restoring, when threatened, basic trust.
Loving Communities 2: Trust
The psychologist Erik Erikson observes that what he calls “basic trust,” the openness to reality as a whole as trustworthy, is necessary for human life. As sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers have observed, the practices that construct the communities that constitute us as social beings assume and enact this visceral sense of reality as fundamentally supportive of our existence. As these thinkers also observe, the senses, paradigms, theories, and ideas, including those of scientists, through which we know the world and ourselves, presume this sense of reality as having an order we can at least partly understand and upon which we can at least partly rely.
Sources of Christian and Western Anti-Semitism
The sources of Christian and Western anti-semitism lie in the betrayal motif which lies at the heart of the Passion Narrative, which lies at the heart of most Christians’ faith.
As little children
The air’s for breathing,
water’s for drinking, the earth’s
for home, we’re for love.
spring bang
the hissing Big Bang
all there is as filtered light
edging angled branch
as cool clear moist air
as green grey patched cream plane tree
pellucid shadows
spring cleaving
when the sun falls hot
a man with a chainsaw cleaves
branches from the trunk
brilliance without form
and void blasts through my eyes hits
the back of my mind
