The Archives
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empire, religion, UU, zizek
Therapy, Criticism, and Heresy—Which Is UU?
01.28.10 | Permalink | 2 CommentsI just finished up The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity by Slavoj Zizek, the so-called wildman of philosophy. And I keep going back to a passage on the very first page of the intro. In it, Zizek says that religion in our current day of global empire is limited to two […]
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empire, gnosticism, good-earth, kingdom-of-god, material-world, naturalism
Good earth gnosticism
08.16.07 | Permalink | Comments Off on Good earth gnosticismGnosticism gets a lot of guff for seeing the material world as something to be escaped from. I think that’s a caricature of gnosticism. Sure, the Used Car Salesman who created the world set up a lemon of a universe, but that doesn’t mean gnosticism has to be anti-body and anti-earth. Even if many flavors […]
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empire, ideology
Empire is dead, long live Empire
08.10.07 | Permalink | 7 CommentsThe trouble with Empire is its persistence. Empire falls down now and again, but it always gets up. What’s worse, those who push it down usually help it get back up. If they’re lucky enough to kill Empire, they find themselves becoming its latest incarnation. Empire is dead, long live Empire. Anti-Empire means well, but […]
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empire, evil, gnosticism, gnostics, theodicy
The empire never ended
I finished up Philip K. Dick’s freaky book VALIS last night. It’s gnostic, and if there’s anything consistently true about Gnostic writing, it’s that it’s freaky. “Phildickian” gnosticism does not disappoint on that account. There’s the VALIS—the Vast Active Living Intelligence System—which controls the world and even creates it. There’s the Black Iron Prison, which […]
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empire, globalization
Alternatives to empire
08.08.07 | Permalink | Comments Off on Alternatives to empireJust a quick shout out to a cool blog: Alternative2Empire. (Mission statement. Values statement.)
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amoral, atheism, empire, religion, sharon-welch
Is religion amoral?
07.02.07 | Permalink | 9 CommentsBack to Sharon Welch in After Empire. An atheist, she writes: What, then, is the religious? This is the name we give to those encounters and energies that are constitutive but amoral, those encounters that are vivid, compelling, and meaningful, but fragile. (Page 30.) I’m still chewing on that.
