Existence Strikes Back Part III
Modernity was the Great Rejection: The Rejection of the Tao. Post-Modernity is a Rejection of the Great Rejection: Attempts to get the Tao back into individual lives and society. The past 200 years have seen scores of popular efforts to get back in touch with the Tao, ranging from the occult to the Beats to St. Therese Lisiuex's Little Way to Zen to psychedlics. These essays pile on the examples.
Fyodor, Flannery, and GoodFellas Reveal Something Ironic about Our Modern World
Essences become meaningless in both a perfect and marred world.
Entangled Life: How Fungi Know
Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. This short book tells me everything I want (and far more than I need) to know about mushrooms and their earlier stages. The author, it seems to me, tries to keep a sane perspective
The Difference Between Superstition and Religion
What Do Fungi Have to Do with Athens?
Eve Tushnet at The University Bookman
Rational Magic
Tara Isabella Burton at The New Atlantis
Excerpts from Joseph Bottum's "Christians and Postmoderns"
[T]hough we cannot revert, we nonetheless have resources that may help us to advance beyond these late times. The modern project that attacked the Middle Ages has itself been under attack for some time. For some time, hyper-modern writers have brought to bear against their modern past the same
Foucault was a Pedophile?
And introducing one of the themes of Part III of The Existence Strikes Back project: The rise of the irrational.
Mushrooming to a New Religious Understanding?
Tuesday mornings are hard on me for some reason, but this morning, delight hit me from three angles, thanks to this one essay.
Delight One: Bookman
It comes from The University Bookman, one of the first subscription journals I read (my Dad subscribed and I started reading it when I
Joseph Bottum and Postmodernism
I frequently wondered what happened to Jody Bottum. I hear he was forced out of First Things after Fr. Neuhaus died. Wikipedia says it was an argument over funding and the direction of the journal. I've liked to speculate it's because he wrote a surprising piece