Where God Comes from: Reflections on Science, Systems and the Sublime

Where God Comes From explores how the sublime and miraculous can be found in a whole range of processes-- from chemistry and biology to language and literature and social interactions -- and how they loop back on themselves to form complex systems, stitching themselves and their environments together. The book traces an arc that passes through a series of different essay forms: a prose poem in Twitter-length units, a philosophical dialogue, traditional essays, and finally a story. Each is a metacognitive investigation of mystical experience as what happens when consciousness discovers its family resemblances with other recursive processes.,

Ira Livingston is currently Professor and Chair of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY (since 2007), after a long stint at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (where he founded and directed a Cultural Studies Ph.D. program). He is the author of two books and editor of two others in cultural theory and poetics, broadly considered. His Ph.D. is in English from Stanford in 1990.