Michael Martin's Blog, page 6

Post-Christianity: How Christianity Failed and Continues to Fail

I think I surprised an interviewer recently when I was asked about the prophetic vocation of Sophiology in my own work and the role Nikolai Berdyaev has in such a project. The last chapter of my recent book Sophia in Exile is on Berdyaev and I think the scathing critiques of Christianity he delivered in the 1930s and 40s are just as salient today as they were when he issued them. In fact, seeing that we are now in an unapologetically post-Christian era, I’d say his criticisms are even more cogen...

Sophia in Exile: An Introduction

My latest book, Sophia in Exile , appeared in print last week courtesy of Angelico Press. Below is the introduction as found in the text.~ mm

INTRODUCTION: NOTES FROM EXILE

After Francis of Assisi and his companions walked the hundred and ten or so miles from Assisi to Rome, a trek that took days, in order to petition approval for founding the Order of Friars Minor, the cardinals interviewing them asked what their rule would be. Pretty straightforward question. Francis, a pretty straightforwar...

Michaelmas and the Battle Against Evil

“Michael is interpreted as meaning ‘Who is like God?’ and it is said that when something requiring wondrous powers is to be done, Michael is sent, so that from his name and by his action it is given to be understood that no one can do what God alone can do: for that reason many works of wondrous power are attributed to Michael. Thus, as Daniel testifies, in the time of the Antichrist Michael will rise up and stand forth as defender and protector of the elect. He it was who fought with the dragon...

Rewilding the Church, Part 2

In my last post, I wrote about my small community’s efforts at rewilding the church, not as a way to rewild the landscape around this or that church building (which, it seems, is how some conceive of it) but in terms of rewilding Christianity. The landscaping approach, which I get and support to some degree, just strikes me as just another bourgeois hobby of the gentile middle class, kind of like fashion jeans or something. I have a more radical project in mind.

Primarily, this is a project of ...

Rewilding the Church

In biodynamic farming (of which I am a longtime practitioner), a salient principle is that the individuality of the farm, in addition to crops, domesticated animals, pastures, and orchards, should also contain water—streams or ponds, for example—and wild places, such as woods, coppices, or meadows—which are the homes of a great variety of flora and fauna. The idea here is to practice biodiversity. As Alan York, the late, great master of biodynamics says in the film The Biggest Little Farm (which...

The Parallel Polis, or How to Beat the Technocracy

In my book Transfiguration, I write about various possible alternatives to the sterile and anti-human, anti-sophianic institutions that surround us. For one, I propose the idea of “the sophianic hedge school” as a healthy alternative to Education, Inc. that has done so much to ruin human flourishing and poison society. I also floated the idea of perishable currency, inspired by both Rudolf Steiner and Guido Preparata. This is to say nothing about the importance of the CSA (“Community Supported A...

Playlist for Times of Madness

You know it, and I know it: things are bizarre. Hopefully, we will not be slipping into a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” but I am not taking any bets. The closer we get to a culture of “show me your papers,” the closer we get to societal chaos.

In that spirit, I have put together a little playlist to help navigate the season of this our angst. You will notice that most of these songs are from my youth. I remember reading an interview with John Lennon just before he died (I think it was ...

House Church: Off-Grid Ecclesiology

Remember when Easter was canceled in 2020? I do. Then Christmas was canceled. I also remember how Church authorities were supportive of it, though obfuscated behind the banal rhetoric of the issued official statement.

I also remember an Eastern Orthodox friend of mine telling me parishioners at his church were put on a round-robin schedule saying who could attend the Divine Liturgy and who could receive the Eucharist and when. And this didn’t have anything to do with the “Easter duty,” which w...

The God of the Technocrats

In the Zoroastrian mythos, Ahriman (or Angra Mainyu) is the spiritual power who opposes Ahura Mazdao (or Ormazd), the Creator, whose name means “Lord of Wisdom.” In his early novel Cosmic Puppets (1957),Philip K. Dick uses the Ahura Mazdao/Ahriman binary in the story of the battle between spiritual and cosmic evil and good played out in small town Virginia; it was kind of a precursor to Dick’s later fascination with Gnostic dualism and in no small part influenced his thoughts on what we would no...

The Mystical Body of Romanticism

Some people, it seems, have a tendency to over-idealize the life I live, as if on our biodynamic farm my family and I shimmer in some agrarian dreamworld in the manner of rather tall hobbits. Ours is certainly a world foreign to that of most of those in my social class (intellectuals, academics, and other learned professionals), but it’s far from idyllic. Farming is hard work, for one thing, and we often put in 12-14 hour days at the height of the growing season. For another, it’s unpredictable—...