The updated/remade version of the classic Carl Sagan series Cosmos has been drawing lots of attention in the past few weeks, both positive and negative, and one of the areas that has come under the most scrutiny is the show’s inaccurate portrayal of Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century philosopher, occultist, mystic, and proto-scientist whose life and…
Category: Religion & Philosophy
The Cultural Sounds of Apocalypse
Sounds of Apocalypse, Part Two “The Walls of Jericho Fall Down” by Gustave Doré This is Part Two of contributor Dominik Irtenkauf’s four-part essay “Sounds of Apocalypse.” Before reading it you may want to read Part One, “Roar of Creation and Destruction,” in which Dominik lays the explanatory groundwork for the theme he is pursuing….
Apocalyptic America: Our psychic lens of doom and gloom
Stefany Anna Goldberg recently offered some interesting reflections on the reality and nature of America’s enduring obsession with the idea and sense of an impending apocalypse. She rightly points out that, culturally speaking, the roots of this tendency extend all the way down to a positively genetic level: America is a nation rooted in Apocalypse….
The paranormal: America’s new religion?
I would be interested to hear how many Teeming Brain readers find aspects of their own beliefs and experiences described by this extremely interesting article at Pacific Standard, and/or how many of you have observed the trend it identifies playing out in the lives of people you know. That trend, by the way, is “a…
Teeming Links – September 27, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today’s opening and presiding word comes from Jonathan Franzen: While we are busy tweeting, texting and spending, the world is drifting towards disaster, believes Jonathan Franzen, whose despair at our insatiable technoconsumerism echoes the apocalyptic essays of the satirist Karl Kraus — “the Great Hater.” Nowadays, the refrain…
Teeming Links – September 20, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today’s opening word comes from novelist and National Book Award winner Richard Powers, speaking to The Believer magazine in 2007 about the unique value of reading — and specifically, reading fiction — in helping to “deliver us from certainty” during an age when a great deal of evil…
Teeming Links – September 13, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Far Away from Solid Modernity (Revolution: Global Trends and Regional Issues) Zygmunt Bauman on liquid modernity and our unfolding apocalypse. “[We live in a society] which, moving relentlessly towards the apocalypse, does not care (does not want to care or is not able to) about the security and…
Teeming Links – September 6, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net To introduce today’s offering of necessary and recommended reading, here’s a description of a trend in academia that represents one of the most ironic of all ironies (as described by the excerpt), and also one of the most welcome and revealing developments of the present age: It’s odd…
Myth, transmedia, and the alchemy of the self
Teeming Brain columnist David Metcalfe attended DragonCon in Atlanta this past weekend to cover the well-established paranormal wing of the world’s biggest genre convention. He will be publishing a full report here in the near future. In the meantime, Disinfo.com has published a partial transcript of a panel that David moderated at the convention. The…
Teeming Links – August 30, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today’s opening word is actually double: two opening words. The first is from John Michael Greer, writing with his typically casual and powerful lucidity. The second is from international studies expert Charles Hill, who writes with equal power. They’re lengthy, so please feel free to skip on down…