{"id":1276,"date":"2009-11-05T10:33:51","date_gmt":"2009-11-05T14:33:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.therowboat.com\/?p=1276"},"modified":"2009-11-05T10:46:47","modified_gmt":"2009-11-05T14:46:47","slug":"planning-is-a-new-variety-of-the-sin-of-pride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/2009\/11\/planning-is-a-new-variety-of-the-sin-of-pride\/","title":{"rendered":"Planning Is a New Variety of the Sin of Pride"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

Jean-Luc Marion wrote, at the opening of his book God without Being,<\/em> “One must admit that theology, of all writing, certainly causes the greatest pleasure.”<\/p>\n

Today, at the remarkable online journal Triple Canopy<\/em>, I’ve got an essay that’s about the closest thing I’ve so far come to writing theology. It’s called “Divine Wilderness<\/a>.” It is a project, actually, that I’ve been working on for some years now\u2014originally when I was 19 years old studying computer science, then in a very confusing essay I wrote two years later, and, most recently, with a talk I gave<\/a> at the Bushwick Reading Series. Thanks to the guys at Triple Canopy<\/em>, the essay\u2014as well as the accompanying images and computer code\u2014are finally in a form that approaches comprehensibility. I hope.<\/p>\n

They situate it in an issue called “Urbanisms: Master Plans<\/a>,” putting the theological abstractions of my piece squarely in the context of architecture and urban design. It really is a wonderful thing to do to abstraction\u2014to thrust it onto the ground, to put it among things<\/em> and ask, “What have you to say to one another?” So the reflection is theological, but its consequence is intended to be of the world. I very much recommend reading it in the context of the issue as a whole, which is being slowly published a piece or two at a time.<\/p>\n

I’ll leave you with the passage that inspired the whole project, which I discovered hidden away in David Cayley’s 1992 book Ivan Illich in Conversation<\/em>. The characters are Illich and Jacques Maritain, the neo-Thomist French existentialist philosopher.<\/p>\n

In a 1988 interview, the priest-turned-radical Ivan Illich recalls a 1957 encounter with Maritain. Illich wondered why there was no reference \u201cto the concept of planning\u201d in his work.<\/p>\n

[Maritain] asked me if this was an English word for \u201caccounting,\u201d and I told him no\u2026 if it was for \u201cengineering,\u201d and I said no\u2026 and then at a certain moment he said to me, \u201cAh! Je comprends, mon cher ami, maintenant je comprends.<\/em> Now I finally understand. C\u2019est une nouvelle esp\u00e8ce du p\u00e9ch\u00e9 de pr\u00e9somption.<\/em> Planning is a new variety of the sin of pride.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Find out what he means<\/a> at Triple Canopy<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

Jean-Luc Marion wrote, at the opening of his book God without Being,<\/em> “One must admit that theology, of all writing, certainly causes the greatest pleasure.”<\/p>\n

Today, at the remarkable online journal Triple Canopy<\/em>, I’ve got an essay that’s about the closest thing I’ve so far come to writing theology. It’s called “Divine Wilderness<\/a>.” It is a project, actually, that I’ve been working on for some years now\u2014originally when I was 19 years old studying computer science, then in a very confusing essay I wrote two years later, and, most recently, with a talk I gave<\/a> at the Bushwick Reading Series. Thanks to the guys at Triple Canopy<\/em>, the essay\u2014as well as the accompanying images and computer code\u2014are finally in a form that approaches comprehensibility. I hope.<\/p>\n

They situate it in an issue called “Urbanisms: Master Plans<\/a>,” putting the theological abstractions of my piece squarely in the context of architecture and urban design. It really is a wonderful thing to do to abstraction\u2014to thrust it onto the ground, to put it among things<\/em> and ask, “What have you to say to one another?” So the reflection is theological, but its consequence is intended to be of the world. I very much recommend reading it in the context of the issue as a whole, which is being slowly published a piece or two at a time.<\/p>\n

I’ll leave you with the passage that inspired the whole project, which I discovered hidden away in David Cayley’s 1992 book Ivan Illich in Conversation<\/em>. The characters are Illich and Jacques Maritain, the neo-Thomist French existentialist philosopher.<\/p>\n

In a 1988 interview, the priest-turned-radical Ivan Illich recalls a 1957 encounter with Maritain. Illich wondered why there was no reference \u201cto the concept of planning\u201d in his work.<\/p>\n

[Maritain] asked me if this was an English word for \u201caccounting,\u201d and I told him no\u2026 if it was for \u201cengineering,\u201d and I said no\u2026 and then at a certain moment he said to me, \u201cAh! Je comprends, mon cher ami, maintenant je comprends.<\/em> Now I finally understand. C\u2019est une nouvelle esp\u00e8ce du p\u00e9ch\u00e9 de pr\u00e9somption.<\/em> Planning is a new variety of the sin of pride.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Find out what he means<\/a> at Triple Canopy<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[99,45,54,52,101,19,16,88,50,73],"class_list":["post-1276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-algorithms","tag-becoming","tag-conversation","tag-evolution","tag-imagination","tag-metaphor","tag-religion-science","tag-secularism","tag-technology","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1276"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1276"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1282,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1276\/revisions\/1282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}