Robert Desnos had spent his youth prophesying. In the early 1920s he was the great sleeper-medium of Surrealism, falling into hypnotic states, improvising poems, drawings and predictions, and seeming at times to André Breton and the others almost frighteningly receptive to whatever might lie beyond ordinary waking consciousness. Breton
I am a tumour but benign A growth despoiled of why Ancient blind will, heaving Extruding its keen innards For the scrutiny of the mob Tous semblables, innocents What design had you or I What principle or end, eh? Wherein was knit my brow Or your thick useless head? Perhaps
When we make biological evolution the engine that "actualizes" mind ever more fully, we should ask what we're actually observing to justify the claim.
चितिः स्वतन्त्रा विश्वसिद्धिहेतुः citiḥ svatantrā viśva-siddhi-hetuḥ “Awareness, self-standing and free: the all-manifesting cause of the All.” —Kṣemarāja, Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam 1 One cannot but be sympathetic to the agrarian type of social anarchism, rooted in the land and
Modernity is often told as a story of emancipation, even when that story is contested. Its critics are easily classified: reactionaries, nostalgists, or belated defenders of a lost order. Antoine Compagnon’s Les antimodernes (2005) begins by unsettling this familiar arrangement. What if the most penetrating critics of modernity were
For Boersma, the world is a theophany. At odds with Aquinas, he posits Love – not Being or Goodness – as the ultimate metaphysical principle.
The question of immortality cannot be answered until we know what an individual truly is. Before we ask whether the self survives, we must ask what sort of being the self is.
We cast our sins on a scapegoat and call it grace. But what if we were built to carry them? Is vicarism our curse or our salvation?
Thomas Troward (1846–1916) occupies a distinctive and, in many respects, indispensable place within the movement later called New Thought. Where much of that current tended toward exhortation, therapeutic promise, or loosely articulated metaphysics, Troward sought to supply what it otherwise lacked: a principial foundation. His project was not to
Fabien Muller's Kenologische Versuche: Der Johannesprolog zwischen Nāgārjuna, Vasubandhu und Meister Eckhart (Kenological Essays: The Johannine Prologue between Nāgārjuna, Vasubandhu, and Meister Eckhart, 2022) is one of the most ambitious recent attempts to recover the Johannine Prologue as a text of first philosophy. It is neither a work
As a strong protectionist and a supporter of faltering, disjointed efforts to re-establish an effective primacy of politics over economics—building and maintaining the power of sovereign authorities at various levels (from local to supranational) to break with kneejerk neoliberal economism—it pains me once again to see the
Is our horror now more about the dissolution of the boundaries or being entombed by them? We’ve felt somehow thrice at a blow, so: diffusion’s angst and enclosure’s angst and angst’s angst—masticated in upper and lower bestial jaws, what will you not do? Anything, so
The King of the World (Le Roi du monde, 1927) is a short but exceptionally dense work in which René Guénon examines the traditional doctrine of a supreme spiritual centre governing the world. The immediate occasion of the book lies in the early twentieth-century diffusion of accounts concerning Agarttha
Sophia
Khalil Gibran's celestial rain as a mirror for creation's rhythmic longing and the indwelling presence of Divine Wisdom.
Christmas
A Nativity sanitized of its social and political context is devoid of incarnation. Insofar as the phenomenon of Christmas is "Incarnate," it includes all the dung and flies that accompany our fleshly existence.
Tibetan Buddhism
Taken as a whole, Dakpo Tashi Namgyal’s teaching reveals a master who articulated Mahāmudrā not as a collection of exalted claims but as a rigorously tested path of recognition, diagnosis, and integration.
penal substitutionary atonement
The model of penal substitution occludes the event of the Crucifixion with abstract mechanism. But the phenomenon of Calvary offers and compels something more.
universalism
Martyrdom in a universalist paradigm entails no fear of eternal damnation and is a more credible "witness" before others.
Peter
Peter's Confession is not merely the origin of ecclesial authority, but the beginning of a hard lesson about how divine insight can coexist with human misunderstanding—and how the Church is built on both.
An opinion piece in Vanity Fair wants to give us rubberneckers—or, you know, trainspotters, depending on which side of the tracks we may be standing (there can be only two, right?)—an apter set of historical precedents to talk about the M.O. of really existing Trumpism over against
incarnation
So long as we take our human experience seriously, anything that is thoroughly arbitrary cannot be genuinely salvific.
It gives me hope in the goodness of humanity to know that, unremarked by policymakers or the press or this digital panopticon in which we all voluntarily inform on ourselves, millions of men and women are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, quietly and durably happy. Every incentive structure leads
modernity
"A great master says that his breaking-through is nobler than his emanation, and this is true." ~Meister Eckhart, Sermon 87
Bulgakov
A brief reflection on Bulgakov and the irrevocability of everything.