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‘I asked the songthrush about the soul …’: Pat Bennett in conversation with Pádraig Ó Tuama
Full text linkIn a wide-ranging conversation Pat Bennett and Pádraig Ó Tuama look at how imaginative, non-dogmatic approaches to the sacred text – similar to how we engage with poetry or art – can open up deeper, more embodied, and more surprising encounters with the divine. Ó Tuama advocates reading the Bible not as a singular message to decode, but as a multifaceted, ‘wild’, participatory narrative that invites questions and emotional response. The text here does not only speak to us, but also reads our lives in return. Some may find this openness to multiple meanings unsettling, seeking a more definitive interpretive framework, yet Ó Tuama and Bennett offer an invitation to rediscover a deep, creative, curious attentiveness to the text as a pathway for encountering God anew in both Scripture and daily life
Take A Bow When You Fall: A Sensory Autoethnography of Aikido
Full text linkThis article is an autoethnography reflecting on my experience as a beginner practicing aikido. It centres around the embodied experience of this martial art: how practices feel to the inexperienced body and the emotional highs and lows accompanying both strength and vulnerability. Following a disjointed narrative that combines experiences over weeks of practice, this autoethnography considers the trust, hierarchy, and gendered expectations that arise and are consequently challenged during training. Violence and the considerations of physical limitations are also taken into account in order to provide a personal description of aikido practice as a woman
Supervaluationism, Dynamic Supervaluationism, and Higher-Order Vagueness
Full text linkThe fact that the phenomenon of vagueness can itself be vague—and its vagueness be vague as well—seems impossible to make sense of without getting a headache. This so–called higher order vagueness makes theorising about vagueness a notoriously difficult task for philosophers of logic and language. This difficulty manifests itself in that, even if a theory can convincingly explain what vagueness is and how we can reason about it, when faced with the vagueness of the just–tamed vagueness, it gets flooded with paradoxes and makes the initial theory seem implausible. In this paper, I argue that Rosanna Keefe’s supervaluationism is one such theory. Even though it elegantly accounts for the first order of vagueness, it becomes less elegant when questioned about the higher orders. To demonstrate this, I show that Keefe’s system fails to resolve various paradoxes of higher-order vagueness such as the finite series paradox or the D* paradox. Furthermore, I argue that in her attempts to accommodate the paradoxes by adopting a rigid hierarchy of metalanguages, Keefe invites new worries. Given these criticisms, it is unlikely that Keefe’s theory can be ‘argued out’ of these paradoxes—‘finite series’ in particular. Instead, I argue that the theory must be substantially modified if it is to be salvaged, and one way to do so is by making the proposed structure more dynamic. I attempt to do so by sketching an outline of dynamic supervaluationism that can tackle the problems that Keefe’s supervaluationism cannot. I close my essay by teasing out some challenges that the proposed theory could face and offering possible solutions. I believe that supervaluationism is a very attractive approach to vagueness and therefore, it is worth developing further into a more robust theory that could tackle its higher orders
Global Thought, Shadow Projection and Coloniality: A Quantum Case for Religious Practice
Full text linkIn this paper I argue that religious practice is key to global thought. To demonstrate this, I explore the work of two thinkers: psychologist Carl Jung and Marxist liberation philosopher Enrique Dussel. As a means of addressing the implicit ontological biases which close the minds of many to spiritual wisdom, my discussion makes use of the quantum metaphysics developed by Jung in correspondence with his patient, Wolfgang Pauli. For Jung ([1957] 2010, 13), real religion is defined by an ongoing relationship to the transcendent, while the rigid dogmatism common to modern institutionalised religion serves to stifle this relationship. Religious practices help us to cultivate our own relationship to the transcendent, and thus to resolve antitheses which we will otherwise externalise into the social world, projecting the qualities which we do not want to see in ourselves onto the Other (Jung [1957] 2010, 3). This “shadow” projection is a key driver of the ongoing crisis in global thought, exemplified by Israel’s genocide in Gaza (Albanese 2024). Furthermore, the coloniality and dehumanisation wrought by shadow projection is both perpetuated and capitalised upon by military-industrial-complexes which are materially incentivised to manufacture consent for endless wars in defence of “liberal-democratic” ideals. Religious practices are key means of challenging dogmas, religious, liberal, conservative or otherwise, and reconciling ourselves with the shadows they cast. Dussel shows us what this means on the collective level, emphasising the need to grapple with history, and with the materiality of the present, if we are to understand our infinite responsibility to the Other through recognition of their difference, and, thus, to think globally
Letter from the editors
Full text linkEditorial introduction to INTER-\u27s debut issue - The Crisis in Global Thought
Art, spirit, language
Full text linkIn this personal inquiry on the intertwining impulses of the religious and artistic spirits, Kate Hennessy, a writer and artist, reflects on the power of visual art and artmaking to help us move beyond the limitations of religious language. She explores how art can provide a visual dialogue imbued with spirit and transcendence that help us to understand what it is to be human in a relationship with God. Hennessy draws upon diverse influences, from the Paleolithic artists to Brice Marden, Anne Truitt and Mark Rothko, to provoke thought on perceiving art and artmaking, whether overtly religious or not, as a form of prayer, a practice of devotion and an ongoing expression of this human desire to live in full participation with life and with God
A Lingering Taste in my Mouth
Full text linkThis autoethnographic work seeks to explore food anthropologically and interrogate the power relations imbued in ideas of spice. Through the embodied experience of having a meal at Maisha, an “Authentic Indian & Seafood Restaurant”, this work centres the ways in which senses, particularly taste, create cultural meanings. Crucially, through a consideration of the author’s positionality and St Andrews as a field site, this work analyses the role of globalisation, consumption, and colonialism in creating cultural meanings of food and spice