Tolkien’s Theology and the Creation of Middle-earth
Back In the late 1960s, when I was a young teenager and an aspiring hippie of the Tolkienesque persuasion, it was fashionable to be seen with the…
Love of the Other as Other: What is Enchantment and Wonder?
We in the West and those societies worldwide have been disenchanted over the last century seem to be in especial need of re-enchantment and a renewed sense…
Soul Wonder: The Art of the Metaxu
No one, we would hope, is wonder-proof, at least not initially. Aristotle tells us that philosophy begins with wonder. We wonder at the world and at ourselves…
Hamlet in the Metaxy
For both William Desmond and Eric Voegelin, Plato’s concept of the metaxu or metaxy is of paramount importance. Described by Plato in the Symposium and other works,…
Tennyson’s Poetry of Departure and the Heart: Posthumous Mind and the Limit Case in Ulysses, Tithonus, The passing of Arthur, and Crossing the Bar
In this discussion I will look at the concept of posthumous mind described by William Desmond and the concept of the limit case described by Barry Miller…
Why Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott Has to Die
The legend of the Lady of Shalott, which is of such recurring interest and fascination to Victorian writers and painters, would seem therefore to be an instance…
Some Reflections on Eugene Webb’s “The Question of Eric Voegelin’s Faith (or Atheism?): A Comment on Maben Poirier’s Critique”
In Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History Webb comments, of liberal conceptions of order in history, that they “overlook the transcendent dimension of the human project, but they…
Grace in the Garden: The Fall of Man and the British Pastoral Tradition
“An intermediate nature . . . prevents the universe falling into two separate halves.” —Plato, Symposium (203b). Almost from the beginning of when human beings began to…
Art as a Via Negativa: A Note on Larkin’s High Windows
If human beings can be described as living between the apeirontic depth of the fundamental grounding reality “prior” to both inorganic and organic life, and the noetic…
Can a Natural Disaster be a Symbol of Truth? The Indian Ocean Tsunami: a Voegelinian/Desmondian Meditation
“Now the Flood: water is the matrix of all life, but in deluge its creative indeterminacy overwhelms and swamps. Finite beings are flimsy, tossed around as flotsam.…
Browning’s Monstrous Duke: The Metaxy, Quantum Mechanics and the Process to Destruction of the Phaulos in My Last Duchess
In his poem My Last Duchess, first published in 1842, Robert Browning creates one of the rarest types of character in literature: the phaulos. Understood in the…
Toward the Light or Toward Darkness: Moral Trajectories in Conrad and McCarthy
What the German-American philosopher Eric Voegelin has called "the Drama of Humanity" is manifestly not over: if it was then who would be discussing it anyway? That…
The Presence of the Spoudaios, Spoudaic Potential, and the Spoudaic Spectrum in Western Literature From Shakespeare to the Present
The aim of this article is to propose the notion that the spoudaios, spoudaic potential, and the spoudaic spectrum are constantly recurring figures in literary texts in…
The Incarnation of the Poetic Word
The Incarnation of the Poetic Word: Theological Essays on Poetry and Philosophy. Michael Martin. Kettering OH: Angelico Press, 2017. In these theological and philosophical essays on…
Language, Power, and the Reality of Truth in 1984
In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell presents us with a world where systemic thinking, a form of solipsism represented by the Party and embodied in O’Brien,…