Michael Martin's Blog, page 13

Seven Books Not Enough People Read

What is it with books and writers? Often, really lousy writers and their equally lousy books achieve great popularity, while miraculous works of miraculous artists and thinkers fall to the margins of obscurity. For example, no one read William Blake much until he was rediscovered by the Pre-Raphaelites and William Butler Yeats. The same was the case for a few centuries with John Donne until T.S. Eliot rescued him from neglect in the early 20th century. In the spirit of rescuing from neglect,...

A Rosicrucian Easter Meditation

In my scholarship, I often write about the Rosicrucian phenomenon that appeared I the first decades of the seventeenth century. In Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England, I have a chapter entitled The Rosicrucian Mysticism of Henry and Thomas Vaughan and in The Submerged Reality, I have one on the Paracelsian physician and Rosicrucian apologist Robert Fludd, and recently I edited an edition of the seventeenth-century alchemical fantasy, The Chymical Wedding of...

Astrology, the Coronavirus, and Cosmological Estrangement Syndrome

I typically stay away from topical subjects on this blog. So much of blogging, or so it seems to me, is involved in dreadful and sensationalistic exercises in ambulance chasing and hysteria in which Id rather not be a participant. Hopefully, Ill avoid that in what follows. As a biodynamic farmer, I am probably more aware than most about whats going on in the heavens at any particular moment. We plant by the moon and the planets, so the connection of the earth to the rest of the cosmos is an...

The Stolen World

Modernity has a unique giftthat of generating its opposite. In the sterile wake of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, the Romantic philosophers and poets, especially those of Germany and England, resisted the totalizing demands of science and progress and sought to restore a vision of human flourishing mindful of mystery, of nature, and of the imagination. In the bleak aftermath of industrialization and rapacious streams of Capitalism in the late 19th century, people turned to...

“In the first, spinning place”: Sophiology and the Idea of a Farm

Sophiology has deep, deep connections to various social streams in our world: in distributism and communitarianism, for example, as well is in some varieties...

Sophiology vs. the Zombie University

Anybody involved in its various manifestations and permutations knows that higher education in the United States is on life-support if not already dead. Ther...

Pagans, Peasants, and the Regeneration of All Things

It is easy to become despondent when surveying the current political and social landscape. For me, this despondency becomes all the greater when witnessing t...

Pagans, Peasants, and the Regeneration of All Things

It is easy to become despondent when surveying the current political and social landscape. For me, this despondency becomes all the greater when witnessing the theological complicity in these frauds and their manifold iterations—whether from the Blue Meanies writing for traditionalist Catholic blogs, from their lotos-eater counterparts at the other extreme, or even from much of what passes for more high-brow speculation on that one outlet that publishes the occasional interesting but for the...

Ars Poetica: The Death (and Resurrection) of Poetry

I’ve been teaching a lot of poetry to undergrads these days, and these are typically the moments my teaching becomes most inspired. I’m not sure the students necessarily understand what I’m talking about—poetry is often a very foreign, very strange object to them, for ours is a culture sadly and (for the most part) unconsciously suffering from a lack of the poetic. I ask my students how many of them know any poems by heart. None. I ask them if they remember and Mother Goose. None. Then I...

The Wisdom of the Stars: Thoughts on Astrology

People often ask me if I “believe in astrology,” a question I really don’t know how to answer. Of course I don’t. Asking people if they believe in astrology is pretty much like asking if they believe in the ocean or in snow or in food or something. It’s a dumb question. Even a more precisely articulated question, such as “Do you believe the stars influence us?” rather misses the mark. A better question would be “Do you believe that we are part of the cosmos and that the cosmos is part of us?”...