The Dionysian Naturalist

                                                                                                                       What Maimonides and Yom Kippur Teach Us About Repentance Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Part I: Repentance Is Something We Do: Maimonides and the Practice of Teshuvah. Today I am thinking particularly about his understanding of teshuvah —usually translated as repentance, though the Hebrew carries the richer sense of return: turning back, returning to the right path, becoming again the person one ought to be. What attracts me to Maimonides is how little interest he has in cheap forgiveness. Repentance is not simply feeling badly about something. Nor is it saying “I’m sorry,” re...

 About Me About Me I’m Wayne Martin Mellinger, a sociologist, writer, educator, activist, and lifelong student of the strange and beautiful ways human beings make worlds together. I was trained as a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I earned my Ph.D. My intellectual home has long been in symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, phenomenology, and critical social theory. I have taught sociology and related subjects at several universities and colleges, and I continue to write about interaction, institutions, homelessness, inequality, recognition, and social justice. But scholarship is only part of my life. Years of community organizing, homeless outreach, recovery work, and advocacy have convinced me that ideas matter most when they return us more attentively to the world and to one another. My three blogs explore different territories of that larger project. Doing Modernity examines sociology, social theory, interaction, ins...

  Annie Dillard, Dionysian Naturalist Saint What I Learned from a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Annie Dillard died this week at eighty-one, and I find myself thinking about what she taught me. Not what she argued, exactly. Dillard was never the sort of writer from whom I learned doctrines. She taught me something more fundamental: how to look at the living world, how to stay with what I saw, and how to resist turning away when nature refused to conform to my ideas about what the sacred ought to look like. Her great Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, but calling it “nature writing” has always seemed inadequate. Dillard was doing theology with a creek, insects, muskrats, light, death, and her own astonishment. ( AP News ) I have a small and unofficial communion of people I think of as Dionysian naturalist saints . Peter Lamborn Wilson is there. Sam Keen is there. There is no Vatican for this peculiar religion, fortunately, and I alone app...

  The Cynical Cycle of Mindless Inaction Recognition, Critical Consciousness, Disruption, and the Praxis of Doing the Next Right Thing Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. A Prayer Before Beginning Spirit of Life, Mystery in which we live and move, Sacred depths of this astonishing world: Wake us. Interrupt the sleepwalking routines by which we move through our days seeing without seeing, hearing without listening, knowing without understanding. Startle us with a black beetle on a red rose bush. Stop us before the dead horseshoe crab washed upon the shore. Let the ordinary trip the switch. Turn our attention toward what we have learned not to notice: the neighbor sleeping beneath a freeway, the joke that diminishes another human being, the worker whose labor disappears behind what we consume, the species vanishing without ceremony, the child frightened by authorities, the lonely, the despised, the discarded, the person standing directly before us whom our categories have prevented us from...