Michael Martin's Blog, page 16

JESUS THE IMAGINATION, VOL 3: CHRIST-ORPHEUS

JESUS THE IMAGINATION, VOL 3: CHRIST-ORPHEUS features, among others, the work of Emi Shigeno, Daniel Joseph Polikoff, Jim Stoner, Devan Meade DeCicco, translation by Jonathan Monroe Geltner, and an extensive interview with harpist, composer, and founder of music thanatology, Therese Schroeder-Sheker. The following is the introduction to the volume. INTRODUCTION: THE KEEPER OF ZOË In his fascinating discussion of the myth of Dionysos (Orpheus being a permutation of the god of wine), the twenti...

“May the holiness of Thy name shine anew in our remembering”: Sophia in Exile

We all have books that have changed us or the way we think about the world, about ourselves. My own list would include William Blake’s Jerusalem, Kathleen Raine’s Defending Ancient Springs, Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on beekeeping and agriculture, the work of Goethe, and the poetry of William Butler Yeats, Czeslaw Milosz, and Guillaume Apollinaire, among many others. One book that significantly changed the way I think in recent years is Margaret Barker’s The Mother of the Lord, Volume I: The L...

Confessions of a Sophiologist: The Dangers of Sophiology

We live in a truly schizophrenic cultural moment: a world that is coming to recognize that the earth is a living being while simultaneously yawning (if not applauding) as a traumatized seventeen-year-old girl is euthanized. Enter Sophiology. The essential insight of Sophiology is that the cosmos is infused with the Glory of the Lord, Sophia (Wisdom). The world may be fallen, but, at moments, sometimes due to our intentionality and sometimes due to a free movement of grace, that glory shines t...

Christianity and Reincarnation, or Here We Go Again

“As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus instructed them, ‘Don’t tell anyone what you have seen, until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.’ The disciples asked him, ‘Why then do the teachers of the law say that Elijah must come first?’ “Jesus replied, ‘To be sure, Elijah comes and will restore all things.But I tell you, Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but have done to him everything they wished. In the same way the Son of Man is going to suffer at their...

PSA: Environmentalism Does Not Need to be a Shame Culture

A couple of anecdotes: A few years ago, before Marygrove College (where I worked for a long time) shuttered its undergraduate program and moved into a kind of non-profit version of McEducation (K-12...skip...graduate school) I attended a luncheon honoring the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary who had founded the College. The IHMs are very involved with social justice initiatives and very environmentally woke. However, in conversation with one of the sisters over lunch, she fel...

Something Just beyond Expression: An Interview with Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus

In this interview from Jesus the Imagination, Volume II: The Being of Marriage, Michael K. Kivinen engages with members of what be the most innovative and inspiring group in ostensibly "Christian" music of the last thirty years. Among the most underground of underground musicians and artists, Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus continues to inspire those who take the aesthetic and prophetic strains of Christian art seriously. Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus “regard themselves as a c...

On the Edge of the Unthinkable: An Interview with Owen Barfield

This interview was conducted by James Wetmore in 1996, about a year before Barfield's death at age ninety-nine. James (who at the time of the interview was connected to the Perennialist movement) kept the interview in his archives, unpublished, until he offered it to me for the first volume of Jesus the Imagination. Barfield, one of the Inklings and a dear friend of C.S. Lewis, found his way into meaning through poetry and the work of Rudolf Steiner (academics and apologists appreciate the fo...

Idolatry: A User’s Guide

It all started when that guy on Facebook linked an academic essay upbraiding Jacques Derrida’s failure to live up to the Christian ideal in his book The Gift of Death. I have a lot of respect for Derrida, whom I think of as probably the most important negative theologian of recent memory; this despite the fact that he was born a Jew in Algeria, experienced anti-Semitism as a youth, and later confessed to being content to “pass for an atheist.”1 That he should be measured with a Christian yard...

The Redemption Business: Easter and Biodynamic Farming

This article, in slightly different form, originally appeared in Church Life Journal. Biodynamic farming, though it possesses many practical benefits—such as raw milk, fresh vegetables, fresh meats and eggs—has always been for me a kind of sacred activity. This sacredness resides in one undeniable fact: the blood of Christ saturated the earth on Golgotha. This is not some minor, locally-interesting detail. Rather, it is a supernatural event of the highest importance for the entire planet; and...

Everything is Bullshit: What a Great Time to be Alive!

Lent was rough this year. I suppose it should have been, seeing I’ve been in a simmering state of anger at Catholic hierarchs and their alternately buffoonish, clueless, and despicable pronouncements and acts since last July. My state of mind was not at all ameliorated by last week’s letter from Benedict (“It was the 60s!”) XVI. Then yesterday while teaching I received this text from a friend:: “If Notre Dame burning down is not a metaphor for the Catholic Church I don’t know what is.” My fir...