Thursday, December 2, 2021
Jim was my deep guide when I was a student of his at Wesleyan and I owe the trajectory of my intellectual life to his support in those years. He sponsored my University Major in Integrative Science as a creative alternative to traditional departmental learning and together we plunged into the worlds of metascience, religious history, critical theory, and the fallacies of post-industrial progress. Our conversations were always probing, constructively deconstructive, illuminating, supportive and encouraging -- never aiming toward certainty, but toward often vague penumbras of understanding where acceptance of unknowing is the nobler path. I'm grieved by his passing and wish we could have had one last conversation before his dementia set it. I'm thankful for the visit we had in Castine, for the chance to thank him then for his humane and fatherly guidance, and I can only hope he carried some reassuring measure of my gratitude and affection somewhere inside his radiant, kind and quirkily disputatious mind until the end. The great vessel has sunk to its eternal depths now, and I am grateful to have had the privilege of being on deck for a small part of the voyage that privileged me with new and deep waters of exploration, foreign lands of thought, and guidance in navigating the riptides and gales.
