Reflections on Spinozian Religion
What, if anything, do Kierkegaard s reflections on anxiety have to teach us about the religious impulse? If you read many common interpretations of his book The Concept of Anxiety, the answer you could easily come away with is: nothing, unless you re already a devout Christian. That is, many such interpretations treat the book s religious themes [ ]
Living outside the U.S. for quite some time has made me realize, more than I ever did before, the true extent of American exceptionalism. When I say this, I m sure that most of my liberal or progressive friends will immediately think of Donald Trump, who, using his talent for direct messaging, won the U.S. presidency [ ]
One traditional distinction in philosophical and theological reflection about love is that between eros and agape. At the most basic level, this distinction has been framed in terms of the relation between the value we see in the things and persons we love on the one hand, and the love we have for them on [ ]
One common idea about religion is that religious worldviews are ones in which we endorse the existence of the supernatural—phenomena capable of affecting the world around us to alter the course of natural events: for example, divinities, spirits, or apersonal animistic forces. What, though, is the supernatural? The concept of the supernatural involves more than [ ]
Among Spinoza’s many notorious views is his necessitarianism: the view that everything that happens happens necessarily. Clearly, the view flies in the face of how we usually think. The coin comes up heads, we’re late for that appointment, we brake just in time to avoid the speeding car, and we think things might have gone some other way: it might have come up heads, we might have made the bus, we…
Consider two common ways we talk about wondering. On the one hand, there’s wondering whether, when, what, who, why, or how. In such wondering, we confront the world as a question: the unknown strikes us, and we linger before it, as if approaching what remains undisclosed. On the other hand, there’s wondering at: the experience of standing in astonishment.
Check out the new issue of Colin Lee Marshall's great journal Erotoplasty, containing work by a host of writers, plus two short reviews by yours truly of little-known modernist masterpieces. The first review is of Unica Zürn's The Trumpets of Jericho. The second is of a volume by Henri Michaux (Life in the Folds) that was the subject of a recent essay here on my blog.
As suggested by the title of the book into which the 20th century French poet and artist Henri Michaux incorporated his account of them, the strange race of beings he called the Meidosems exist in the folds. That is, folds are where the world collapses upon itself, bringing together what is otherwise apart; and withdraws from sight into the hidden-away. Likewise, unconnected multiplicities are…
Feedback emerges within a zone of sonic precarity, intensifying into the intolerable on its hither side. As anyone who’s used a microphone knows, the most obvious factor in determining this zone is space: the distance between microphone and speaker, where they’re pointed, the shape of the room, and so on. We move the mic here and there, and are haunted by whining that comes and goes, until, in a…
Humility tends to draw suspicious looks. If all it comes to is avoiding arrogance, then of course we’ll cheer it on. But anything more, and something unsavory can seem afoot. The humble concede, submit, and obey. We’re humble, yes, when absolutely necessary—to dot our moral i's and cross our political t’s. But those who talk about making humility a fundamental life aspiration can seem as if…