Michael Martin's Blog, page 17

You are Here: The Tutelar of the Place

A few days ago, I walked out of my house to do some clean-up after building a manger for my goats when I saw a car slowly driving by and the driver point to various things on the property for his passenger. I went over to introduce myself and the driver, a recently retired sailor from the navy, told me he used to visit my farm when he was a child in the 1960s and 70s to stay with his great uncle and aunt. He told me about many of the features long since disappeared: where the water pump was i...

Science Doesn’t Need to be this Way

Textbooks often describe the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century in triumphalist terms, glorying over the moment learning threw off the benighted shackles of the Church and Aristotle and stepped into a brave new world of truth. Posterity lauds the supposed winners of this paradigm shift—Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Newton—and derides the losers, figures like Paracelsus, Robert Fludd, Athanasius Kircher, and Thomas Vaughan, all of whom persisted in affirming the participati...

To Our Bodies Turn We Then: Virtual Farming, Virtual Environments, and Spiritual Malaise

Recently, in response to this, I heard from a true comrade-in-arms, Jon Egan of The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus. Jon commented on the title of my latest book, Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything, and a certain malaise he’s been feeling. As he wrote, “Re-imagining everything is a project that sounds extremely timely. Maybe it’s a Lenten mood, but I’m feeling extremely dispirited by events both global and local at present, and a sense that Chr...

An Introduction to Jane Lead: Freedom and Sophiology

I don't think enough people know about Jane Lead. This introduction is an excerpt from my book, Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England (Ashgate, 2014). Profoundly influenced by the mysticism of Jacob Boehme, Jane Lead (1624 – 1704) was a visionary mystic, a prolific author, and the leader of the Philadelphian Society, a religious group named for one of the seven churches mentioned in Revelation. In her evangelical mission, Lead directed the Society toward “the Refor...

The Rosicrucian Mysticism of Henry and Thomas Vaughan

I am currently putting the finishing touches on my Metaphysical Poets course (should be available March 9th). Since I have these poets on my mind, I thought I would share an excerpt on Henry Vaughan and his identical twin, the alchemist and Anglican priest Thomas, from my book, Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England (Ashgate, 2014). Scholars often speculate about how “hermetic philosophy” informs both Thomas’ religio-scientific writing and Henry’s poetry. “Hermetic...

John Donne on Holy Dying

I am currently putting the finishing touches on my Metaphysical Poets course (should be available March 9th). Since I have these poets on my mind, and today being Ash Wednesday, it seems only fitting to consider the poet and preacher John Donne's thoughts on Holy Dying. What follows comes from my book, Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England (Ashgate, 2014). A significant aspect of both Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and the sermon known as Deaths Duell, taking in...

Bread and Wine: Agriculture and Mysticism

A long time ago, it might have been at a lecture, I heard someone relate the myth of Zarathustra and how, in a dream state given from Ahura Mazda, he saw a golden blade cut through the earth and bring fertility to the soil. Zarathustra, inspired by the vision, gave to humanity the gift of the plough (my permaculture wonk friends will here decry this invention. I get it, I get it…). Another part of the story has always intrigued me. Zarathustra, or so the story went, was also divinely inspired...

All Things Shining: Uses of Splendor in Catholic Education

This is a post originally found on my former blog at Angelico Press. In the final scene of Terrence Malick’s 1998 film The Thin Red Line we hear the thoughts of Private Edward P. Train (played by John Dee Smith) as he and his surviving comrades sail away from the battle of Guadalcanal: “Oh, my soul, let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes, look out at the things you’ve made. All things shining.” Throughout Malick’s film (indeed, throughout most of his films) the director discloses to t...

The Green Man, or how to resist the tyranny of the algorithm

This is a post originally found on my former blog at Angelico Press. Once upon a time, in a summerland called The Late-Nineteen Hundreds or Early Two Thousands, my wife and I went to the Michigan Renaissance Festival accoutered in festival attire and accompanied by our then extant brood (might have been three, might have been four or five—I’m not good at keeping track), at least one of whom was probably in a stroller. At one point in our festivality, we encountered a unique character: The Gre...

Filling the Empty Signifier: A Meditation on the Grail

“It has to be confessed that we have come forth from a prolonged study of the Grail Critical Apparatus with empty hands.” ~ Arthur Edward Waite[1] I think the time has come to admit that what is called “the Holy Grail” is some variety of empty signifier or glittering generality. I know this is, in a way, “a hard saying,” but, nevertheless, brothers and sisters, the time has come. But this is not to say that I don’t think the Grail exists. If we survey the Grail literature that arose during th...