I found it important to begin by reminding my audience what a library essentially is: a memory bank. Only thanks to the existence of libraries are we able, as a culture and as a society, to keep remembering our own past. But libraries do much more than just looking back, in nostalgia or otherwise, at…
In Praise of Hellfire & Brimstone
âAnother night as the holy Father entered the church he saw the evil one seated, as it were, with a paper in his hand which he appeared to be reading by the light of the lamp, and his hand was hideous to behold and furnished with iron claws. The saint approached him, and asked him…
Age of Philosophical Vertigo
Is it just me, or is there a large-scale, culture-wide meta-pattern taking shape when it comes to the status of philosophical ideas of the “Big Question” variety? Are questions about the nature of personal and cosmic reality, and even of ontology itself, going mainstream and joining the more standard issues of politics and economics as…
My fellow barbarians: The dumbing of Americans and their campaign speeches
Two days ago, the August 31 edition of the PBS program Need to Know concluded with a brief video retrospective of American political convention speeches from the last century: From William Jennings Bryan to FDR to Adlai Stevenson to Barack Obama, anchor Jeff Greenfield takes a look at the convention speeches that propelled some politicians…
Study: Human psychology combines natural and supernatural thinking
AUSTIN, Texas â Reliance on supernatural explanations for major life events, such as death and illness, often increases rather than declines with age, according to a new psychology study from The University of Texas at Austin. The study, published in the June issue of Child Development, offers new insight into developmental learning. âAs children assimilate…
Energy, food, and the upside (or not) of dystopia
This piece from The Telegraph’s Jeremy Warner is supposed to be about the upside of the fact that we’ve transitioned definitively to a new era of elevated food and energy prices, but the upshot that Warner arrives at sounds less like a silver lining than a recipe for a Promethean desperate-dystopian transformation of human…
Recommended Reading 23
This week’s bumper crop of excellent reading and viewing includes: an essay on the past, present, and future of apocalyptic expectations and their measurable impact on real-world religious and secular circumstances, including our present geopolitical prospects; a fine examination by Charles Hugh Smith of the moral-and-monetary corruption infecting not just the “1 percent” but everybody…
Writing, money, art, society, and copyright: A tangled web
Recently in his blog for The New York Review of Books, Tim Parks — novelist, nonfiction writer, translator — has offered some strikingly interesting and cogent reflections on the relationships among and between art, authorship, law, money, ownership, individuals, and twentieth-to-twenty-first century sociocultural realities. Their background is, first, the rise of writing as “a well-defined…
Midway (FILM TRAILER) by Chris Jordan
Midway is, or will be, a film from the MIDWAY media project, and its trailer is one of those rare instances of the form that, like the megatrailer for Cloud Atlas, delivers a powerful experience in its own right. Here’s what it’s all about: The MIDWAY film project is a powerful visual journey into the…
“Till immersed in that mighty ocean”: Perils of Awakening in a Universe of Hungry Ghosts
Down, down, I sank, till immersed in that mighty ocean where conflicting elements were swallowed by a mountain wave of darkness, which grasped me within its mighty folds and I sank to the lowest depths of forgetfulness. — Andrew Jackson Davis, quoted by James Webb in The Occult Underground It is not possible for anyone…