Michael Martin's Blog, page 7

Paul Kingsnorth and John Michael Greer Are My Homeboys

I can take a hint.

A few weeks ago, I went through a spate of queries as to whether I had read anything by Paul Kingsnorth or John Michael Greer. These inquiries were from readers of my books and my blog as well as from good friends—and when I received three such prompts from three people completely unknown to one another within the space of a couple of hours, I figured it was time to give these two writers a hearing, Like I said, I can take a hint.

I had never heard of Kingsnorth, the novelis...

Golden Asses: Our Initiation into the Mysteries

Recently, a reader of my work emailed asking me what sophiological fiction I might recommend. In my reply, I mentioned Goethe’s Faust, Solovyov’s Three Meetings, and David Bentley Hart’s recent offering, Roland in Moonlight (and might I add that his forthcoming novel, Kenogaia, may be his most sophiological work yet—and, in my opinion, the best thing he’s written). Unfortunately, I forgot to mention Andrei Bely’s Petersburg. But I did not omit what may be the greatest sophiological novel of all ...

The Dionysian Rise of a New Cultural Paradigm

What follows is a blogpost I contributed to a now defunct news website so long ago I forget exactly when it was, though I do know it was during the Obama administration. Today, while pulling weeds in my leek bed, I started musing about Euripides and his figure of Dionysus and remembered that I’d written this. I still think it has something to say.

I have been teaching Euripides’s play The Bacchae recently, one of the more disturbing tragedies in a Greek canon rife with disturbing subject matter...

THE DIVINE FEMININE: LEADING US EVER ONWARD

What follows is my introduction to Jesus the Imagination, Volume 5: The Divine Feminine , published last month by Angelico Presss.

“Let a body finally venture out of its shelter, expose itself in meaning beneath a veil of words. WORD FLESH. From one to the other, eternally, fragmented visions, metaphors of the invisible.” ~ Julia Kristeva [1]

I have never felt comfortable with Simone de Beauvoir’s bristling in The Second Sex in regards to Goethe’s concluding lines of Faust: “the Eternal Feminine ...

When You’re a Feminist Theologian Like Me

I never really considered myself a feminist theologian. In fact, I never really considered myself a theologian at all—that is, until I read John Milbank’s jacket endorsement for The Submerged Reality when it was published six years ago:

“In The Submerged Reality, Michael Martin suggests why a radicalized orthodoxy in the future will need more to ‘walk on the wild side’ and appropriate what is best in the esoteric, occult, and even gnostic traditions. He intimates that the past failure to do thi...

Call No Man Father

Perhaps you have seen this meme above? Talk about butch! It’s pretty much the religious equivalent of this:

I have often wondered from where such a masochistic sensibility arises. It is very perplexing, but there does seem to be something in the human psyche that craves discipline and bowing to authority, despite the simultaneous triggers that resist the same. In watching the Christian, and especially Orthodox and Catholic traditionalist, landscape over the past decade, I am starting to come up...

Call for submissions: Jesus the Imagination 6: “Flesh and Spirit”

We live in a curious time: a time in which the realities of the spirit and the body are almost entirely denied in favor of a technocratic dream of self-invention and an absorption in the virtual self.

It is time to reclaim both the flesh and the spirit.

To that project, Jesus the Imagination: A Journal of Spiritual Revolution is now inviting submissions of poetry, essays, photography, and artwork for volume 6, “Flesh and Spirit.” We are also interested in translations! Send no more than 3-5 ...

Jesus the Imagination, Vol 5: The Divine Feminine

—and a Call for Submissions for Volume 6

One of the great maxims of Waldorf education is that the ideal lesson is one in which the students come to both tears and laughter, the idea being that the emotional panorama of human experience is essential for education to be a truly human endeavor. Editing volume five of Jesus the Imagination on the theme of “The Divine Feminine” was precisely such an experience for me.

Alison Milbank’s beautiful essay “Oiling the Wheels of the Heavenly Chariot: Fema...

Education, the State, Sophiology

Today, the 4th of May 2021, marks the fifty-first anniversary of the killing of four college students and the wounding of nine others by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University, an event recorded in the annals of infamy as “The Kent State Massacre.” This event, more than almost any of my life (with the exception of 9-11), has been indelibly burned in my memory since its occurrence. Certainly, this has something to do with it falling on the day after my eighth birthday and the confusion ...

Atlantis 2.0

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know about Atlantis. Of course, I’m sure I didn’t know about it as an infant, but I can’t recall when I first heard of the destruction of the island. It’s as if it has ever been percolating in my personal cultural imaginary.

I definitely knew about Atlantis by grade school, perhaps through Marvel Comics’ character The Sub-Mariner, whose home was the underwater realm of Atlantis. Or maybe it was through one of my friends at school telling me about the legen...