the iconoclast's descending

  If the essay is the meteorology of poiesis--attendant and ethically constructive reason without ration-- the poem is its daychart navigation and logged course.   Grounding Language: Nominalism through Kairesis, Post-Secular Modernity, and the Poiesis of Iconoclasm as Radical Immanence Douglas Blake Olds, May 28, 2025 Modernity reframed the relationship between language and reality, replacing tradition-bound metaphysics with individual accountability and nominalist correctives to Platonic abstraction. From apophatic theology through Protestant iconoclasm, enlightenment investigators of thought have wrestled whether language mirrors transcendental truths or emerges through historical, situated use. The biblical narrative—especially Adam’s naming function and the Pre-Pentecostal legacy of Babel--suggests that postlapsarian humanity cannot access absolute meanings apart from God’s bestowal like sunshine and rain, as temporal vectors of grace rather than a frozen moment of ...

  Foundlings: A New Era’s Possibles of Poetic Repair Douglas Blake Olds, May 2025 “Fragments are not abandoned to the elements; they are the elemental.” This line, from the penultimate section of my forthcoming poetry anthology The Inexhaustible Always in the Exhausted Speaks , extends metaphysical revolt. Poetic fragments and marginalia challenge systems that sever knowledge from embodiment and counter Heideggerian notions of totalizing situatedness—where destiny’s "thrownness" threatens to drown grace’s proprioceptive and kinesthetic unfolding. Against epistemologies that ossify into dogma or transcendental fixity, fragments declare that both theology and poetry must be lived, not systematized. In this approach, the poetic fragment is not a deficiency but a refusal. It opposes tentativeness without despair alongside fidelity to the unchaining, the emerging, and the incomplete. Rebutting Joan Didion’s claim that it is easier to see the beginning of things than their ...

  Saturday, May 10, 2025   Gameplay as the arena for gratitude and chivalry Douglas Blake Olds   [My son honored me by asking for some ideas about gratitude and a sermon about teamwork. Follows the text I sent him about the former and under that is the sermon about the latter.]   Culture and teamwork, like gratitude, are cultivated. We emulate who we admire. So that gratitude is foundational to the tested friendships I’ve found with you. Not just loyalty to a goal and collective, but admiration for your gifts behind your acts. My gratitude has been sparked by your qualities and energies that never settle toward a stage or system, but in the pursuit of excellence amid the drama and sharing of gifts applied to sporting moments that develop the character of our community. Men heal, I think, in a specific way by sport without artifice, diffusing conflict by training the mind to step out of the way of muscle, instead allowing gameplay to shape dignifying respe...

  New Blog Announcement a new chapter of divine presence realized in moral, embodied human life—an ethos of conation, virtue, and humility over instrumental rationality and technological seduction.   the iconoclast's descending  (pulls down systems fleeing accountability)   Judges 16:23-30; Daniel 2:31-43;  Matthew 16: 18;  21:12-13 ;  24:2; 15-28;  Douglas Blake Olds 26 May 2025   This Blog is a follow up to my prior blog,  Crying in the Wilderness of Mammon  (2012-May 2025). That  blog's purpose  was  fulfilled with the announcement  of the condemnation of automated immorality by generative A.I.  The basis for this condemnation and its certain rejection of A.I. generative automation in moral spheres is documented and contextualized in my book,  Duty to Warn: Metaphysical Criminality and the CONDEMNED Project of A.I.'s False Ontologies  that first were reported in that blog. While ...