Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“If, for Marx and Weber, capitalism was the dynamo of secular modernity, for Ruskin, it embodied a metamorphosis of the sacred, a perverse enchantment of the world. Ruskin clearly feared that ‘secularization’ was really a capitalist form of idolatry —a rechristening of heavenly ecstasy in a cold baptismal font of money, a re-enchantment conducted under the…
“But how did these households come together in such numbers to form the great concentric arrangements which give the Ukrainian mega-sites their distinctive plan? […] To understand how the citizens put this mental image into effect, translating it into a workable social reality at such enormous scales, we cannot rely on archaeology alone. Fortunately, the…
“To be clear, toxic masculinity is not the demonization of all traits deemed quintessentially male or masculine.138 Rather, toxic masculinity is the combination of a few masculine traits taken to their extremes: at its base, toxic masculinity is predicated on dominance and control.139 It stands for the idea that gender constructs for men require them…
“In the enfolded [or implicate] order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible, from which our ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles, are…
“The actions of billiard players, people in general, nonhuman animals, and even plants when seen in the right time frame, are patently intentional, both in the more precise sense used by philosophers in the line of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and in the more everyday sense referring to an act carried out for some purpose, something…
“A few banal fantasies float across white evangelicalism. It seldom tires of arguing over hell, substitutionary atonement, or biblical inerrancy, and it never misses an opportunity to judge women or non-heteronormative sexuality. But if my claim is that white evangelicalism (as a political project) is quite recent, then I’m also claiming these older ideas are…
On April 30, 2022 I got married to a magical person, in magical place on top of a mountain, during a partial solar eclipse. It was an unforgettable time. Below is a piece I wrote and read to my partner, Erin, on that day: Imagination. As adults, we might be quick to dismiss imagination as…
“The answer to bad speech, we are told, is more speech. The only way that tired bromide could be true, though, would be if it were possible for the bad speech to be definitively rejected through reasoned argument. That is to say, free speech can only be the solution if the result of the ongoing…
“The best response to anyone who wants to take seriously Nietzsche’s fantasies about savage hunters chopping pieces off each other’s bodies for failure to remit are the words of an actual hunter-gatherer-an Inuit from Greenland made famous in the Danish writer Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Eskimo. Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home…
“Communotheism is a divine communalism. “Divine communalism is the position that the Divine is a community of gods who are fundamentally related to one another and ontologically equal while at the same time distinct from one another by their personhood and functions”. In communotheism, there is immanence in that there is radical relationality among the…