Michael Martin's Blog, page 12

Jesus the Imagination: The Garden

I am exceedingly happy to announce that Jesus the Imagination, Volume IV: The Garden is now available. It was a very exciting volume to edit and I am very proud of the work represented in it.

The Garden includes essays by Jeremy Naydler (see below),

You can order copies

Jeremy Naydler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWhnDYyYDjk

Therese Schroder-Sheker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXIi5JWnTI0

Distributism, Sophiology, and the Current Moment

Where are all the distributists at this threshold point in human history? One would think that this would be the prime moment for a distributist gambit. But it’s not, or at least it hasn’t been so far. For those who don’t know what distributism is, it is the notion, popularized in the early twentieth century by figures such as G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, that means of production and property should be widely distributed through societies and not in control of the few, whether the few be...

The Life and Legacy of Jacob Boehme: Review

I see in sudden total vision

The substance of entranc’d Boehme’s awe:

The illimitable hour glass

Of the universe eternally

Turning, and the gold sands falling

From God, and the silver sands rising

From God, the double splendors of joy

That fuse and divide again

In the narrow passage of the Cross.

~ Kenneth Rexroth, “The Phoenix and the Tortoise”

Unarguably, the most important figure in the secret history of Sophiology is the early modern German mystic Jacob Boehme. The importance of Boehme ...

The Heavenly Cloud Now Breaking: A Message from the Philadelphian Society

Seventeenth-century England was a rotten time and place to live. Civil wars, various iterations of religious persecution, enclosure of the commons, plague. Stuff like that. Stuff like that of our own times. Yet it was also a time of great optimism and inspiring religious intuition and communitas. Anglican priest and poet Robert Herrick celebrated communitas in his boisterous, jovial, and often messy collection Hesperides, holding a magic mirror up to society to show what human flourishing could ...

The Kingdom of Heaven

These are definitely surreal times, unreal times. I mean that literally and sincerely: these are days completely disconnected from the Real. If you think I am speaking directly to current events, though, you would be wrong. Current events, as I read them, are precisely the result of our disconnection from the Real.

As a biodynamic farmer, I am fortunate that at this season of the year I don’t have the time to get entrapped by social media and its discontents. I simply have too much to do—cr...

The Sophianic Resistance

A quick rundown of recent news:

Elon Musk keeps launching satellites Billionaires are racking up record profits 5G, the safety of which has been questioned by scientists and some municipalities for a good long while, has suddenly become essential Oh, and theres this coronavirus thing, which is apparently what Thomas Hobbes was praying for when he prophesied the war of all against all. Because of the coronavirus thing,

All of this, at least for me, contributes to what I can only describe...

Sophiology and the Unnatural Response to Nature

If I have learned one thing from this pandemic, it is that the primary recourse of most of the archons running the world is to flee nature and what is natural and cleave to the unnatural as the salvation of our souls. The unnatural idols range from the Messiah-like vaccine promised to arrive some time in the future and deliver us all from the scourge to the Ahrimanic desire to track people and isolate them for their own safety to the more simple remedy of sequestering people in their homesby...

Lockdown and the Technological Colonization of the Human Person

A virtual life is not life at all. In fact, a virtual life, brought to you courtesy of a nearly world-wide lockdown destroys life, as counter-intuitive as that may seem. Being careful is one thing; thinking we can hide from nature is another. In fact, the archons of our age seem to hate and distrust nature so much that they have been trying to improve nature, often if not always with disastrous consequences (Ive written about this often). We think lockdown is the answer. Well, in the...

“Great Pan is...alive!”

Once upon a time, begins Eugene McCrarrher in The Enchantments of Mammon, the world was enchanted. Rocks, trees, rivers, and rain pulsated with invisible forces, powers that enlivened and determined the affairs of tribes and empires as well. Though beholden to the caprice or providential design of a variety of spirits and deities, the world of enchantment could be commanded by magic or humbly beseeched through prayer.1 He goes on to argue that first the Protestant Reformation, followed by the...

Fanfare for the Common Man

One of the many ugly side-effects of the current pandemic, a moral tragedy in the truest sensedeath is assured no matter which path we takeis the often simplistic responses to its repercussions. It seems from the news media and social media, that people whose anxieties about the pandemic are primarily economic are characterized as unfeeling boors who care only about themselves and dont care if anyone dies from the virus. I think thats unfair from any direction, although the outlier or false...