Christopher S. Morrissey

Written by Christopher S. Morrissey

Christopher S. Morrissey is a Fellow of the Adler-Aquinas Institute and lectures in logic and philosophy at Trinity Western University in Canada. He is also the managing editor of The American Journal of Semiotics and author of "Hesiod: Theogony / Works and Days" (Talonbooks, 2012).

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In order to explain surprising political phenomena like Donald Trump and Brexit, we have to look at the unprecedented impact of new technologies on our total environment. Douglas Rushkoff, the author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, has entertained the thesis that the television age, which brought people together, is over. He opines that the television age has been…

The documentary film Best of Enemies (2015) is not just a compelling chronicle and contextualization of the famous 1968 television debates between William F. Buckley, Jr., and Gore Vidal. As the sequence during its closing credits makes clear, the documentary also aims to provide us with nothing less than the origin story of our current digital age of polarized politics.…

Modern technological innovation has made globalization possible. And globalization’s new social reality is unparalleled in history. Accordingly, it presents politics with new challenges. But it also presents politics with unprecedented technological power to deal with these new challenges. However, the power of these technologies is ambiguous, since they can create two types of experiences: “hot” and “cool.” These two experiences…

Pope Francis, in his wise reflections on holiness in Gaudete et Exsultate (“Rejoice and Be Glad”), discusses Gnosticism and Pelagianism as “two subtle enemies of holiness.”
The Pope calls them “anthropocentric immanentism disguised as Catholic truth.” That is, they are both unhealthy patterns by which humans stay focused on themselves and on worldly concerns.
His discussion of Gnosticism notes how its essential…

According to the philosopher Eric Voegelin, there are no more than four fundamental modes of theoretical speculation. Voegelin identifies these four fundamental modes as: cosmogony, anthropogony, theogony, and historiogenesis. These modes speak, respectively, of the genesis of the universe, the genesis of human beings, the genesis of the divine, and the genesis of society. Unsurprisingly, modern science speaks to these…

From Big Bang to Big Mystery: Human Origins in the Light of Creation and Evolution. Brendan Purcell. New York: New City Press, 2012.
 
This excellent book repays individual study but in my experience it is also an ideal volume for bringing order to group discussions in seminars. It provides a solid basis for philosophical inquiry into questions of origin about which…


Terrence Malick’s  film, The Tree of Life (2011), is a significant cultural achievement, not only cinematically but also philosophically. Back in 1969, the philosophically inclined Malick produced a bilingual edition of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons, supplying the English translation.With The Tree of Life, the meditative practices visible in his previous films–Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven…