I’m not aware of having David Bentley Hart’s review of All Things Shining, by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, in mind when composing the “About the Current” page.  However, while rereading it for another matter of interest, it struck me as expressing something very close in spirit:

We can attempt, through a purely spontaneous exertion of the will, simply to impose meaning on our circumstances, as a feat of imagination. … Or we can surrender in perfect passivity to powers that lie beyond us, in the hope of being moved by them toward meanings that we cannot fashion for ourselves. …

Our proper comportment toward the world should be neither of these, however — or so Dreyfus and Kelly contend — but rather a sort of creative receptivity, neither purely active nor purely passive, but poetically open to the call of the gods, and to those experiences of fortuitous wonder in which world and self are given to one another. Life is “meaningful” only when we are swept up out of ourselves in moments of self-transcendence that call forth our highest powers of creative engagement with the world. In these “moods” we see sacred and shining things all about us. And such moods come in a vast variety — Jesus’ experience of agape, Dante’s vision of final heavenly bliss, Luther’s joyous trust in divine grace, even Kant’s sense of the categorical imperative.

Obviously, my interests diverge from those of Dreyfus and Kelly by the very fact that the Current’s mission assumes the existence of and seeks to find truth (in its various layers), but their use of “circumstances” is similar to my use of “currents.”  The larger difference, though, comes with the crucial questions:  On what grounds do we choose which of the three options (fight, surrender, or adjust) to pursue, and (relatedly) what are we intending to find or accomplish by heading upstream, downstream, or cross-stream?  That’s very much related to the aspect of the book review that brought me back to it:

[According to the authors, we] must find a way back to a polytheistic world, one in which the sacred might again show itself to us, not under the aspect of a single governing truth, but as a beautiful diversity of often irreconcilable truths. As the prophet of the new dispensation Dreyfus and Kelly propose Herman Melville.

As my short book on the subject explains (in obscure, overtly literary fashion), Melville was clearly interested in the multiplicity of perspectives on life and meaning.  What is easily forgotten in the Modern Age is that the boat sinks. All of the theorizing and pondering throughout the tome interweaves with actual work and risky action.  In Moby Dick and in other writings, right down to his personal letters, Melville found meaning in physical work — that is, in the act of living, which is not very far off from some variations on traditional theology, including Catholics’.