I live just 45 miles from the town of Glen Rose, Texas, which is the subject of this informative new feature article in The Texas Observer. (Or how should one describe it besides “informing”? Amusing, perhaps? Illuminating? Galling? Surreal?) I’ve been there, taken the tours, seen the dinosaur prints. But no human prints in among…
Category: Religion & Philosophy
New documentary follows Vatican-approved exorcist
This new documentary titled The Exorcist in the 21st Century, is slated to be released this month. Judging by the trailer, it looks to be truly interesting: The film’s website shows that it’s from the Swedish production company Gammaglimt AS. They offer this description: The Exorcist in the 21st Century takes the viewer into the…
“Solipsist”: A surreal short film that’s “a meditative and hypnotic experience for dreamers”
SOLIPSIST from Andrew Huang on Vimeo. As I type these words, I’m still in a daze from this short experimental film, and I invite you, too, to come and have your mind turned inside-out. Anything I could say by way of introduction or explanation would only be a hindrance, so I’ll just leave off talking…
Is America an economic hothouse for growing psychopaths?
The past year has witnessed the rise of a kind of cottage industry of speculative blogging and associated online chatter about the idea that America’s ruling economic and political institutions — which have now, let us note, collapsed together to become one and the same — are ideologically and bureaucratically structured to attract and promote…
Today we “medicate” anxiety, but for Kierkegaard it was central to being human
My own personal experience has borne out, in spades, Kierkegaard’s exquisitely expressed contention that a full engagement with the anxiety or dread that goes with being human is, in fact, central to the spiritual task of realizing one’s humanity. In this brief New York Times piece, philosopher Gordon Marino draws out this central theme of…
Near-death experiences, the “life review,” and — Desperate Housewives?
My wife is a Desperate Housewives fan, and we just finished watching last night’s (March 11) episode, and I’m here to report that I was fairly thunderstruck by the final scene. This is the episode that ends with the beloved character of Mike Delfino being murdered (a development that was revealed/leaked to the public ahead…
A Planetary Myth
Joseph Campbell once said that any new myth, in the “high” sense of the word as an overarching, meaning-making narrative, would necessarily have to be planetary in scope and nature, given the global outlook of our modern technological civilization. He said the famous image of planet earth as photographed from space — an image unknown…
‘This myth is realized today in us’: On the deep meaning of Christmas
Most of my readers know that I grew up in a strongly evangelical Protestant tradition and went on to make the study of world religions, spiritualities, and philosophies a major part of my life. This informs all of my horror fiction (and in fact forms a great deal of its explicit substance), as well as…
“Accepting the Monster into Your Heart”: Horror as a spiritual path
Recently, I was telling some of my college students about a shift in mass entertainment culture. A few years ago, I told them, I began to feel as if “my time,” and also that of my generation — namely, Generation X — had finally arrived. Somewhere around the turn of millennium, the appearance of things…
Jung, the numinosum, and holy dread
Recently on Twitter I had a conversation with David Metcalfe and jadkr — worthy conversationalists indeed — about the ultimate outcome of the dread-filled confrontation between the individual self and the shimmering emptiness of the infinite, the void, the Godhead. The spur for this was my tweeting of a link to an interview with Nancy…