Eric Scheske

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Existence Strikes Back Part III

Existence Strikes Back Part III

Postmodernity: Rejection of the Great Rejection Attempts to get the Tao back. 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.

The Third Way Fever

The Third Way Fever

This modern world’s got a fever, and it ain’t for more cowbell. It’s for third alternatives. Everybody’s itching for that elusive other option, like it’s the last ticket out of a burning city. Ray Oldenburg lit a fuse back in ’89 with The Great Good

Four Reformers

Four Reformers

I had a chance last month to booze it up at Sloppy Joe’s in Key West, but by the time I came across it, I’d already guzzled enough gin to fill a Prohibition-era bathtub, so I skipped it. Bad on me. Sloppy Joe’s was Hemingway’s haunt

Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences by Diana Pasulka

Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences by Diana Pasulka

Fyodor, Flannery, and GoodFellas Reveal Something Ironic about Our Modern World

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

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

The Difference Between Superstition and Religion

What Do Fungi Have to Do with Athens?

What Do Fungi Have to Do with Athens?

Eve Tushnet at The University Bookman

Rational Magic

Rational Magic

Tara Isabella Burton at The New Atlantis

Excerpts from Joseph Bottum's "Christians and Postmoderns"

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?

Foucault was a Pedophile?

And introducing one of the themes of Part III of The Existence Strikes Back project: The rise of the irrational.