Andrew J. Brown

#thought #seedling

Brown has sympathies with the Free Religion (自由宗教 — jiju shukyo) advocated by Shin'ichirō Imaoka.

Conversations

Andrew's Influences

jiyu shukyo
Jodo Shinsu buddhism
Christian atheism
D.G. Leahy's thinking now occuring for the first time
Lucretian inspired religious naturalism
New materialism
Kyoto school philosophy

Paul Weinpahl
Herbert Fingarette
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Epicurus
Lucretius
Parmenides
Heraclitus
Benedict Spinoza
Friedrich Nietzsche
Gerrard Winstanley
Jacob Bauthumley
Anne Conway
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)
Martin Heidegger
Henry David Thoreau
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Leo Tolstoy
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Søren Kierkegaard
David Hume
Ernst Bloch
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Paul Tillich
Henry Nelson Wieman
James Luther Adams
John F. Hayward
Josiah Royce
Paul Wienpahl
Klaas Hendrikse
Norbert Fabián Čapek
Agnes Arber
Thomas Altizer
D. G. Leahy
Michael McGhee
Charles Hartshorne
D.T. Suzuki
Hajime Tanabe
Keiji Nishitani
Kitaro Nishida
Kiyozawa Manshi,
Imaoka Shin'ichirō
Donald A. Crosby
Jerome A. Stone
James W. Woelfel
Freya Mathews
Ursula Goodenough
Mary Oliver
Wallace Stevens,
A. R. Ammons
Gianni Vattimo
Franco "Bifo"Berardi
John D. Caputo
James C. Edwards
J. L. Schellenberg
Simon Critchley
Knud Ejler Løgstrup
Emanuele Severino
Michael Oakeshott
Henry Bugbee
Edward F. Mooney
Thomas Nail
Vicki Kirby
Karen Barad
Emanuele Coccia
Federico Campagna
Jan Patočka
Jane Bennett

Andrew Brown's intellectual footprints

2007

September

Avignon manifesto

Deep Ecology
Deus sive Natura
Pantheism
Panentheism

The Universal Word by Nels F. S. Ferre
Living toward the age of Unimunity by Ferre and Ferre

October

James Luther Adams, twentieth century Unitarian Christian theologian
Theology
God = God and Nature (Deus sive Natura)
Transforming Liberalism: The Theology of James Luther Adams by George Kimmich Beach
Bronson Alcott
conversation

Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged by Roger Scruton
Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle
The Complete Angler: https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/iemls/resour/mirrors/rbear/walton/index.html

The Manifold and the One by Agnes Arber

Norwegian philosopher and ecologist Arne Naess
1986 paper called "The Basics of Deep Ecology"
The Deep Ecology platform

Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought by Tim Ingold https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00141840600603111
Animism

November

Victor Nuovo

Soul
Unitarian Christian vs. Unitarian-Universalist

On his translation of jiyū shūkyō

So, you ask whether the inspiration for the term “inquiring religion” for my extended English translation of jiyū shūkyō comes from Wieman’s book. Basically, no, although, of course, I knew he used it. I used the phrase for two reasons. The first is that, as you know, jiyū shūkyō is an inquiring religion! But the second reason is that in the formal, legal object of the General Assembly of Unitarian & Free Christian Churches (the denomination to which the Cambridge church belongs, and of which I am a minister) it uses the phrase “To promote a free and inquiring religion.” It seemed obvious that this might help people connected with the British Unitarian and Free Christian community feel an instant connection with jiyū shūkyō and be interested in thinking about supporting and promoting it. As to whether I am right about this we’ll have to see!

Andrew's reading list

Spinoza's "Ethics"
Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Essays"
Henry David Thoreau's "Walden"
Isaiah
Ecclesiastes
Mein Kampf

At Oxford:

Ten years after Oxford:

How Andrew studies

after school (around 18)

what I read was basically decided by chance/fate in that I'd simply buy any books that jumped out at me from the shelves of the various second-hand bookshops that I would often visit. Some I loved and kept, some I didn't, and passed on.

After a few years I got a better sense of what was interesting me and so began to look for those things more actively. However, it was always unsystematic and wholly intuitive.

during that time I became particularly interested in the philosophies of:

The last subject area is what got me particularly interested in Tai Chi.

Along the way (and again by chance/fate), I ended up sharing a house in London with a professional philosopher called Martin Joughin who was at the time translating Gilles Deleuze's "Expressionism in philosophy" an annotated translation of "Spinoza et le problème de l'expression" (NY: Zone Books; Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1990.

He could see that I would benefit from a bit more structure to my thinking and so he made me read carefully, and then talk about at length:

As a wild card to help me deal with texts that were hateful and abhorrent, he made me read Hitler's horrific "Mein Kampf". I'm so glad that he forced me to do this because the experience helped me get used to dealing with ideas that, although I despised and wholly rejected them, I still needed to know about and take seriously because others took them seriously

it was Martin's way of offering me a version of Sun Tzu's famous advice to "know thine enemy."

it prepared me well for the moment when I began to train for the ministry and study theology at Oxford. There I had no choice but to dig deep into single books and authors, not all of which I would have chosen to read if I had been left to myself.

Key texts that I read in some real depth during my three years at Oxford were:

On leaving Oxford I then spent the next ten years concentrating mostly on reading Spinoza, Ernst Bloch, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger.

It was in connection with the latter thinker that I was drawn more and more into a study of the Kyoto School of philosophers and to a discovery of Henry Bugbee who, as I think you know, met with Heidegger.

A hugely important discovery for me during this time was the work of Paul Wienpahl and I still consider his short essay "An Unorthodox Lecture" to be one of the most important things I have ever read.

Almost as important -- because it tied up so many of the loose threads of my earlier scatter-gun reading was discovering James C. Edwards' "The Plain Sense of Things: Fate of Religion in an Age of Normal Nihilism: The Fate of Religion in an Age of Normal Nihilism."

2008

By c. 2008 these texts -- and particularly the last two -- helped gift me with a reasonable sense of what was my own philosophical/spiritual centre of gravity.

But it was only on discovering Imaoka-sensei's work that I found a practical, and relatively simple way that could draw all the things I'd been reading and thinking about for decades into something simple and comprehensible enough to people

I didn't choose a path so much as a path emerged by me allowing interest/chance at first to play the greatest role.

there was a period when I was being very systematic about studying once a) I knew what interested me and b) when I was forced to by my Oxford tutors and the demands of needing to take a final exam in theology!

And today? Well, I remain completely committed to the idea of going primarily with the flow of what is happening, but now, thanks to the strong sense of gravity/orientation/way-of-organising-my-consequent-thinking-and-study that has been gifted to me by Imaoka-sensei, I mostly only put my efforts into properly exploring those chance encounters (or is it encounters with the aforementioned Greek/Roman/Shinto/Anitist "gods" of this!) that truly resonate with me.

I do still continue to pay reasonably close attention to, and even now and then explore more deeply, the kinds of thinking that I do not naturally resonate with. I do this because I realise that were I ever to forget that not everybody thinks like me -- or that my way of thinking is the only way -- then I will have betrayed everything that has become important to me.

Things like this make me see better and better the wisdom found in Leszek Kołakowski's short piece, "How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist." I think I am this kind of person . . . and I think Imaoka-sensei was as well.

In the end, it's all about how to become the kind of cosmic human Imaoka-sensei was trying to become. Studying is part of that . . . but equally important is Seiza -- and whether that is the quiet-sitting we do together on a Thursday and Saturday, or the Seiza that is walking and taking photographs.

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