Welcome to my latest Weblog project. I am also taking part in a couple of projects designed for students at Mr. Glasner's Blog and my own new blog for students, Ecumene.
Note: The original title of this blog was "Ecumene," but I decided to rename my student blog with that title and change this one to "The World Global"--which also sucks. I need suggestions.
Ecumene:
Ecuméne is a metaphysical state of being accounting for all life past, present, future (not a common state of religious or cultural unification and/or coexistence). Ecuméne's ontology is distinct from multiculturalism or religious pluralism, though it may have elements of one or the other, or of both. Typically there is a single dominant used as a reference point for all the rest...
The dominant normally applied to the ecumene paradigm is human. The ecumene is seen as those spaces inhabited by humans, and therefore the concept has been largely seen as geographic in nature. As perceived by Hellenes the term oikoumene(οἰκουμένη)
referred to the part of the earth that is inhabited, by all men or by only a subset of men. Often it referred to the lands inhabited by Greeks, excluding therefore the lands inhabited by barbarians.
Barbarians were others. Outside the Middle Kingdom, in the دار الحرب: 외국인, 外国人, the bridge and tunnel crowd. We've been bifurcating the world for as long as we've been in it. Once, this served a clear and immediate purpose. And not everyone in today's world is keen to be your friend--wariness has not outlived its purpose.
However, like other instincts this one does not always inspire the most benevolent or beneficial conduct in our globalized community. Moreover, it is a basic perception. Low-order thinking. In short, Descartes was a schmuck.
This blog will approach space and time as being dependent in origination and manifestation (they are the same). A human collective and a truly global (I am holding off on universal for now) ecumene living up to its name. What's more, we are going to do this without being fruity and far-fetched. One hopes. (I think I already screwed this up.)
I hope eventually to hear voices on the ecumene that address the idea in terms of not only education and history, but physics, mathematics, literature, socio-biology, psychology. Hell, all the isms, ics and ologies of the ecumene are welcome.
But for now, it's just a place for me to work out my thoughts. Maybe with your help.
--WJT
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