Yesterday, I was exploring Deleuze and Guattari again, trying to figure out how their thoughts, their words, fit with my own thinking. I’m not sure I made much progress. I won’t pretend to understand what they are saying. Yet the underlying thought I was coming away with was to challenge orthodox thought and see where the challenges take you.

Yet my religious beliefs are fairly orthodox. How do I put the two of these together?

Romans 12:2 says, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Does reading Deleuze and Guattari contribute to renewing my mind? Is not conforming to the patterns of this world related to challenging orthodox thought?

This morning, I read about the shooting in Chapel Hill. Some people have been trying to shift the narrative around terrorism from “radical Islam” to “extremism”. Others has pushed back against this. I can hear the words of Barry Goldwater, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”.

What is ‘extremism’? What is ‘Islam’? I suspect that many people have many different definitions. Sometimes, it seems, these definitions end up being used to justify violence or terrorism.

As I thought about it, it seems like the real dangers are not ‘radical Islam’ or ‘extremism’. I’m probably extreme in some of my own ways. Perhaps a more significant root of terrorism is ‘certainty’. When you are certain that your way is right and everyone else’s ways are wrong, it becomes easier to lapse into not honoring people with other views, or, even worse, to committing violence against people with different views.

It leads me to a quote from Anne Lamott, “The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty.” My thoughts head back to a paper I read years ago, Our Best Work Happens When We Don’t Know What We’re Doing

The article challenges the dominant assumption that the key to working effectively as academics, organizational researchers, consultants, managers or teachers is to know what we are doing. Instead, it proposes that learning comes from working at the edge between knowing and not-knowing.

How do we work, or better yet, how do we live, at the edge of between knowing and not-knowing? How do we embrace uncertainty? How do we renew our minds, perhaps including challenging social constructs, so as not to be conformed to the patterns of this world?

This leads me to The Cloud of Unknowing.