“When we get past the chaos, the horror, and the paradoxical hope of all that’s unfolding, what we’re talking about and living through is apocalyptic collapse as a spiritual path.” Last Thursday I noted that we were then living through a week of apocalypse here in America. The very next day saw the first-ever police…
Category: Religion & Philosophy
Art, meaninglessness, and salvation by despair
Start the music playing and then read the excerpted texts that follow, which may or may not be connected to each other and/or the music. (The music is JĂłhann JĂłhannsson’s “Fordlandia,” titled after Henry Ford’s epic, disastrous, and somehow mythically tragic folly of trying to create an artificial industrial worker’s utopia in the Amazon rainforest…
C. S. Lewis and H. P. Lovecraft on loathing and longing for alien worlds
Several years ago — almost seven, in fact (he said with a sense of temporal vertigo) — I published a series of posts here about what I then termed the “autumn longing,” that exquisite, fleeting, piercing experience of being tantalized by a vision of ultimate beauty and fulfillment that trembles just beyond the edge of…
Recommended Reading 37
U.S. Out of Vermont! Christopher Ketcham, The American Prospect, March 19, 2013 [EDITOR’S NOTE: This captivating article/essay about the relatively thriving secession movement in Vermont features a cameo appearance from Teeming Brain favorite Morris Berman, who delivered the keynote address at a secession-oriented conference held in September 2012 in the chambers of the house of…
Science without philosophy is delusional
From The New Atlantis, Fall 2012: Biological sciences, much like physical sciences, have been stripped of philosophical concerns, of questions regarding the soul or the meaning of life, which have been pushed off to the separate disciplines of philosophy and theology. Much of modern biology seeks to emulate physics by reducing the human organism to…
Robert Frost as “terrifying poet” of a frozen inner landscape
From The Chronicle of Higher Education, a deeply moving, lovely, and troubling meditation on Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by literature professor H. William Rice, whose father, a Methodist minister, suffered through a transformative depression when Rice was a child and read Frost (among other things) in order to cope with…
TED meets The Wicker Man for “the worst TEDx in history”
So, like, what if you mashed up TEDx with The Wicker Man and topped it all with a heaping helping of The Blair Witch Project? Forget the fact that this sounds like an utterly bizarre hypothetical scenario, perhaps one that makes you expect someone to start singing “One of these things is not like the others,”…
Art, Mystery, and Magic: A Fireside Chat with Don Webb
“True mysteries give more energy, more questions every time you find an answer. I truly think that searching after mysteries is the source of the immortalization of the human soul. If I ever write anything that makes someone consider that maybe they donât know everything about everything, then I have succeeded.” — Don Webb Don…
Book Review: ‘Supernatural: Writings on an Unknown History’ by Richard Smoley
NOTE: This is a longer version of a review that also appears at New York Journal of Books. The book itself was published just today. Supernatural: Writings on an Unknown History, by Richard Smoley. Tarcher/Penguin. Published February 7, 2013. 240 pages. Reviewed by Matt Cardin There’s a handful of writers working today whose books about…
Mass imprisonment in America: A social and spiritual tragedy
The past several years have seen an explosion of public awareness, abetted by a spate of excellent journalism, about the epoch-defining crisis of mass incarceration in America. To take just one notable example, Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, summarizes the situation in unequivocally stark and apocalyptic language: Mass incarceration on a scale almost…