Neanderthal Rock Crystals

I find this sort of thing so fascinating and hope we continue exploring this interplay between ancient humans of various species... Rock crystal scraper: 45,000-year-old Neanderthal tool that shows they had an 'eye for beauty of form and color' | Live Science: A century ago, American archaeologists excavating at a cave site in France unearthed a cache of seven rock crystal tools made by Neanderthals. The discovery was one of the first to prove that Neanderthals were not the unintelligent brutes that many scientists of the time believed they were.

samharrelson.com

Interesting New Book on Assyria (and it’s a free pdf!)

I’ve just finished reading the intro so far, and I’m finding much to like in this new work by Jessie DeGrado on the interplay between the Assyrian empire(s) and ancient Israel, biblical texts, museum reception, and modern receptions. Neat framing in a decolonial context! I’ve been thinking of working on an updated and expanded Asia Has Claims Upon New England…

samharrelson.com

12 Cedar Roses – Sam Harrelson

Excited to share that my poem 12 Cedar Roses was selected for the South Carolina Bards Poetry Anthology 2026. I wrote the poem for Merianna on our 12th anniversary, and the two ancient cedars it references are the ones I’m looking at now in our front yard right now. I debated on publishing this one originally, but glad that it’s found its own little life.  Love is not a bloom we hold, but the trees that keep making them.

samharrelson.com

Two Kinds of Wood

I got my first tattoo today, up in Asheville, thanks to the amazing folks at Thistle and Pearl. It's a black walnut branch running up the inside of my forearm... the compound leaves fanning out the way they do in high summer here in our backyard... and standing beside the lowest of them, a plain cross. Anyone who has read much of what I write knows I did not choose this arbitrarily.

samharrelson.com

An Ecology of Ecclesiastes

You can stand on the bank at Lawson’s Fork here in Spartanburg and watch water become air, the vapor lifting where the current slows over rocks, thinning as the light strengthens, and then gone quickly in a hot July morning. The ancient Hebrew has a term for what the eye is doing there. It’s the word the book we have mistranslated for four centuries sets at its own head, הֶבֶל, …

samharrelson.com

A Life in Act: Edith Stein and the Education of Attention

Edith in Breslau from Wikitree A photograph of Edith Stein, taken around 1920, has become very meaningful to me. She's not a Catholic, a Carmelite, or the woman the Church will canonize as Teresia Benedicta a Cruce. She's a philosopher in her late twenties who has already written the most careful phenomenological study of empathy, who has already been told, in ways both polite and structural, that the university has no chair for her.

samharrelson.com

Duncan Park Stadium’s 100th Anniversary

Heckuva job by the Hub City Spartanburgers team on this Duncan Park stadium giveaway tonight to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Duncan Park (also same year our home was built just down the street) at the game. So well done! So much history for our community and neighborhood!

samharrelson.com

Sacramental Place Poetry Rooted in the Carolinas

As I've been working on my PhD Comprehensive Exams this summer, I've been frequently asking myself what it is I’m actually trying to write. That sounds like the sort of question I should have answered a long time ago, especially after years of blogging, teaching, preaching, consulting, podcasting, and now reading for a PhD in ecology, spirituality, and religion. But the truth is that sometimes you only recognize the shape of your work after you’ve been doing it for a while (which I often said to my middle and high school students as they journeyed).

samharrelson.com

Crabapple not Cherry

Left the local plant store excited about planting my new Cherry tree on Fathers’ Day but realized (after digging a hole) that I’d come home with a Crabapple. That’ll do as well. Malus angustifolia (Narrowleaf Crab, Narrowleaf Crabapple, Southern Crabapple, Wild Crab, Wild Crabapple) | North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox: The native Southern crabapple is a shrub or small tree, 20 to 30 feet in height.

samharrelson.com

Lessons Learned from the Magi — ANCIENT JEW REVIEW

The twelve verses about the Magi in Matthew do not invite final answers; they invite attention, patience, and the persistence to keep digging.

ancientjewreview.com

Baptists and Women Pastors in the News Again

I grew up Southern Baptist and am still a Baptist (and an ordained one at that!). My ordination certificate hangs next to my desk here and was signed by two incredible women who were leaders in the church that ordained me after seminary. Thank goodness for the folks at BWIM for constantly doing the work they do as the SBC continues down the path of politicization, misguided reformed theologies, and “christian nationalism”…

samharrelson.com

Comprehensive Exams Begin

Just a short note to say that I’m very excited to share that I’ve finished up my coursework towards my PhD at CIIS and advancing into my two comprehensive exams. Once those are completed (hopefully by the end of the year), I’ll be in full dissertation mode. Exciting!

samharrelson.com

NextEra Energy to Acquire Dominion, Creating a Utility Giant

nytimes.com

Displaced Forms: Assyrian Reliefs, Ecological Intentionality, and the Ethics of Perception

Twenty years ago (2006), my first book, Asia Has Claims Upon New England: Assyrian Reliefs at Yale, was published by Yale University after my time there as a graduate student working at the Yale University Art Gallery. It's a short study of how carved stones from the palace of Assurnasirpal II at Nimrud came to New Haven and entered the religious, educational, and institutional imagination of nineteenth-century America.

samharrelson.com

The Green Isn't a Reset

By mid-May in Spartanburg, the world can seem to have forgiven us.

carolinaecology.com

Ecological Intentionality and the Metaphysics of Living Form

Ecological Intentionality and the Metaphysics of Living Form continues my ongoing work at the intersection of phenomenology, ecological theology, and process-oriented metaphysics. Beginning with sustained attention to the black walnut tree in our backyard here in Spartanburg, this paper asks whether non-human organisms can be understood as bearers of interiority rather than as merely complex mechanisms. Drawing on Henri Bergson’s account of duration, Raymond Ruyer’s theory of absolute survey, Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of embodiment and flesh, I work to develop “

samharrelson.com

On Noticing a Tree Being Cut Down

On chainsaws, perception, and the quiet disappearance of neighborhood trees

open.substack.com

Mexico City’s Sinking Problem

We’re going to see so much of this in the coming years as NISAR develops more standard models... One of the planet’s biggest cities is sinking so rapidly it’s visible from space | CNN: Between October 2025 and January 2026, during Mexico City’s dry season, NISAR mapped the movement of the ground beneath the city. Its findings reveal that parts of the city are sinking at a rate of around 0.8 inches a month — that’s more than 9.5 inches every year. Areas most affected include the Benito Juarez International Airport, the city’s primary airport.

samharrelson.com

Attention as Ecological Practice: AI Data Centers and the Limits of the Anthropocene

The paper is called "Attention as Ecological Practice: AI Data Centers and the Limits of the Anthropocene," and it starts close to home... literally. A $2.8 billion computing facility is going up on South Pine Street in Spartanburg, in the shell of an old Kohler plant. A few miles away, a different $3 billion proposal, Project Spero, named after South Carolina's state motto, drew hundreds of residents to County Council chambers in opposition before the developer withdrew.

samharrelson.com

Last day of 24th Grade

Finished up on my last day of PhD coursework yesterday and heading into comprehensive exams this summer. It's been an amazing adventure and I'm grateful to the incredible profs, students, and colleagues at CIIS. But whew!

samharrelson.com

Ecology (Without) Fields: Toward a Different Ontology of the Cosmos

I taught AP Physics and Physics and Physical Science (along with Environmental Science, Life Science, and Earth & Space Science) for almost twenty years. I'd introduce the field concept early in the course, and everything that notion seems to clarify. The gravitational field, the electromagnetic field, the wave collapse, and wave functions, etc., all work better as long as you have a playing field.

samharrelson.com

Einfühlung: Stein, Ruyer, and Bergson

There is a moment (you've had it, I've had it) when you stop in the middle of something like a walk and feel, with a certainty that precedes any argument, that something is happening in the organism a few feet away from you. Not that it is moving, or making noise, or occupying space in a way that catches your eye.

samharrelson.com

Trump and 2 Chronicles 7:14

I wish more people in the United States would read the Bible earnestly. Trump reading 2 Chronicles 7:14 is certainly a take (as is doing this performative political experience at the Museum of the Bible)... Trump Will Participate in a Marathon Bible Reading - The New York Times: America Reads the Bible will run from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.

samharrelson.com

What the Black Walnut Knows

My teacher / friend / kin / Juglans nigra I have been intently watching the black walnut in our backyard for just over a year, and I am still not sure I know what it is doing. That sentence probably sounds strange. We have words for what trees do, from photosynthesis and transpiration to allelopathy and mast production, and the black walnut is particularly well-documented in this regard.

samharrelson.com

What the Water Keeps Doing

DuPont State Forest and what the falls teach us about attention

open.substack.com

No One at Waffle House Remembers FEMA Official Who Says He Teleported In

nytimes.com

“Salzburg is no place for my talent.”

I was fortunate to study Beethoven (my favorite) and Mozart in Vienna and Salzburg during my Sophomore year at Wofford College. That experience changed the way I live, my view of music and history, and my trajectory. Fascinating little vignette into Mozart’s life here... Mozart Wouldn’t Be Mozart Without These Three Objects - The New York Times: The exhibition and its accompanying catalog cover the composer’s entire life and legacy, but much of it is devoted to his foundational years in Salzburg, with objects that collectively illustrate how a boy of seemingly miraculous talent became the Mozart we know today. Here are three of those artifacts.

samharrelson.com

The Great Turning

I’m taking The Great Turning course with Prof. Kelly at CIIS now as part of my PhD studies, and thought I’d share this incredible reflection on the life and work of Joanna Macy who co-taught the course with him and continues to have ripples of impact even though she’s passed over (and who many of us look to now as one of the guiding Ancestors even if we were never in her physical presence)...

samharrelson.com

What If AI Learned from Forests Instead of Empires?

I linked to a recent piece this week that highlighted the growing popularity of an open-source project called Edict, built on the ancient Chinese “Three Departments and Six Ministries” model. Instead of imagining AI agents as a kind of flat group chat where everyone talks at once and somehow arrives at a solution, these developers have looked to imperial bureaucracy for inspiration.

samharrelson.com

“Completely off the scale for March”

We need to change our perception with ecological intentionality... Western U.S. heat wave is historic. Here's what scientists say: In the modern era of routine weather balloon measurements, which stretches back to the 1940s, no March heat wave comes close to what unfolded across the Southwest this week, Schumacher said. Earlier March heat waves did occur, including significant events in 1907 and 1910, but neither appears to match this one in strength or duration.

samharrelson.com