Posts by James Ross Kelly

James Ross Kelly lives in Northern California next to the Sacramento River. Mr. Kelly was a long-time resident of Southern Oregon where he grew up. And the Fires We Talked About published by Uncollected Press in 2020 is Mr. Kelly’s first book of fiction.

The Mediation of Jesus Christ – Perichoresis


Union or Separation? It is an important question. Many of us, maybe most of us, started with separation from God because the Western Church has preached separation for so long we didn’t even realize there was an alternative way of looking at things. But, once you take off the glasses of separation and put on the glasse

Source: The Mediation of Jesus Christ – Perichoresis

The Christian Liberal-Arts School at the Heart of the Culture Wars | The New Yorker


Hillsdale College, a school in southern Michigan with roughly sixteen hundred students, was founded by abolitionist, Free Will Baptist preachers in 1844. Today, the college is known as a home for smart young conservatives who wish to engage seriously with the liberal arts. The Hillsdale education has several hallmarks: a devotion to the Western canon, an emphasis on primary sources over academic theory, and a focus on equipping students to be able, virtuous citizens. There is no department of women’s and gender studies, no concentrations on race and ethnicity. It’s a model of education that some scholars consider dangerously incomplete. It’s also a model that communities across the country are looking to adopt.

Source: The Christian Liberal-Arts School at the Heart of the Culture Wars | The New Yorker

The Noosphere (Part I): Teilhard de Chardin’s Vision


I go back again and a again to Teilhard de Chardin having read “The Heart of the Matter” decades ago. Today I saw on YouTube a tribunal of half-dead Protestant theologians pronounce their Calvinist sentence that we live in a cursed creation and appealed to the Holy Spirit for an antidote as I turned it off. And what do you know, here I am.

Teilhard de Chardin

A depiction of the Noosphere A depiction of the Noosphere

One of the key concepts of Teilhard de Chardin’s philosophy is the noosphere, which Teilhard believes is the next phase of human evolution.  Today is the first of a three part series discussing the noosphere:

Part I:  Teilhard de Chardin’s Vision
Part II: Christian Concepts of the Noosphere
Part III: Future Evolution of the Noosphere

The term noosphere derives from the Greek νοῦς (nous “mind”) and σφαῖρα (sphaira “sphere”), and is related to the terms geosphere (inanimate matter) and biosphere (biological life).  Under Teilhard’s vision, God created the Big Bang, which created an evolutionary process starting with the energy of the Big Bang leading to increasing “complexification” to matter, to initial life forms, to human consciousness, to a collective human consciousness (the noophere).  The noosphere emerges through and is constituted by the interaction of human minds. The noosphere has grown in step with the organization of the human mass…

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