Michael Martin's Blog, page 4

The Regeneration Podcast

Dear Friends!

Just a quick note to let you know about a new sophiological initiative, the Regeneration Podcast. The idea for this project started when my good friend, Mike Sauter—a frequent contributor to Jesus the Imagination—suggested the two of us should host a podcast. We know lots of people interested in the regeneration (read: “reimagination”) of culture in fields as far-ranging as economics, education, farming, the arts, science, and religion—and absolutely not limited to these areas! In...

Sacred Magic and the Western Death Cult

Over the past couple of months I have been enjoying a couple of unrelated online discussion forums studying Valentin Tomberg’s extraordinary text Meditations on the Tarot. In one recent conversation with Shari Suter and Nate Hile at the Grail Country channel on Youtube, we discussed the third letter of the book on the card The Empress. (You can watch it here).

I don’t know exactly how many times I’ve read this book, but it is definitely in the double-digits, and every time I read it I find new ...

Infanticide and Sophiology

In 2012, I was teaching a course in college writing, as I have done many, many times over my career as a professor, when a very interesting article made a few waves in the academic zeitgeist. It was short article—easy enough for students to read in about fifteen minutes—and an excellent subject for introducing students to rhetorical analysis. It was co-written by two philosophers teaching in Australia, apparently former students or colleagues of Peter Singer.

The thesis of Alberto Giubilini and...

Sophiology and the Life Questions

For a while there, I regularly taught philosophy in a couple of Catholic liberal arts colleges. Most people don’t teach philosophy to undergraduates the way I did, preferring instead to run a kind of survey of historical philosophic movements (Platonism, Scholasticism, Pragmatism, Utilitarianism, and so forth), which is okay, I suppose, but rather a scholarly or almost antiquarian approach. It’s also often impossibly dull (for students, anyway). It would also be dull for me. So I don’t do it tha...

The New Demons

In early modern England, a playgoer and diarist recorded an extraordinary special effect during a performance of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus:

“Certaine Players at Exeter, acting upon the stage the tragical storie of Dr. Faustus the Conjurer; as a certaine number of Devels kept everie one his circle there, and as Faustus was busie in his magicall invocations, on a sudden they were all dasht, every one harkning other in the eare, for they were all perswaded, there was one devell too many...

A Little Bit of Nothing: Science

Warning: I may go scorched earth here.

The longer I live, the more important the wisdom of Goethe is to me. If Dostoevsky believed that beauty would save the world, Goethe has shown to me that poetry—or seeing the world as a poet sees it—is the method by which one saves it. Goethe was not only a poet and philosopher, he was also a scientist; and his phenomenological method may be his most important contribution to posterity. One saying of his has lived with me throughout my adult life: “He who ...

The New Dark Ages / The New Middle Ages

In his magisterial, if somewhat long-in-the-tooth study The Waning of the Middle Ages, Jan Huizinga diagnoses the end of that mysterious and wondrous time in decidedly psychological terms. “At the close of the Middle Ages,” writes Huizinga, “a somber melancholy weighs on people’s minds.” [1] As I have written on this blog and in my recent book, Sophia in Exile, I detect a similar melancholy strain in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, originally published by early English publisher Caxton in ...

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is the only good book on Purgatory

Purgatory is a strange idea in Catholic theology—and Protestant and Orthodox Christians for the most part don’t buy it (excepting a kind of appropriation found in the “Toll House” notion that pops up among some Orthodox, especially with those killjoy Ephraimites). As a kid, I could never get my head around it. When I asked my dad to explain it, he said, “It’s when you burn—but not forever.” My intro to theology. As a young man I read Dante’s Purgatorio which didn’t seem so much as “Hell Light” a...

The Promised Land / War

Maybe it was last year. I was in the middle of a class discussion about—well, I forget exactly what, maybe it was Ivan Illich, maybe it was Václav Havel—and the conversation turned to the topic of war. Most college students, in my recent experience, don’t think much about war—or about current events to be honest—but I have been reminding them for over twenty years that the horrors of the past, of genocide, the Holocaust, chemical and biological warfare, could happen at anytime. If Germany, home ...

Biodynamic Farming and Gardening as Christian Path: A Course

I am happy to announce that I will be giving a weekend course, Biodynamic Farming and Gardening as Christian Path, this spring. Although I originally toyed with the idea of doing such a course online, on second thought I have decided it would be best to do this the old fashioned way: in person and on my own land, Stella Matutina Farm in Grass Lake, Michigan.

Biodynamics, while it has a solid theoretical framework underpinning it, is more than anything a hands on enterprise, so I intend to comb...