As announced earlier, this blog will host an open space once a month to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers, and this is the week. All the standard rules apply — no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank —…
Month: September 2017
The Terror of Deep Time
Back in the 1950s, sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote cogently about what he called “crackpot realism”—the use of rational, scientific, utilitarian means to pursue irrational, unscientific, or floridly delusional goals. It was a massive feature of American life in Mills’ time, and if anything, it’s become more common since then. Since it plays a central…
September 2017 Book Club
This week’s post is the third of a monthly series of open-discussion posts focusing on books I’ve written. Our theme for the present is my book Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth, and this week we’re discussing “The Second Law: The Law of Flow” (pp. 26-35). I’d like to ask readers to keep their questions and…
The Death of God: A Speculation
I have been reading William Butler Yeats’ strangest book, A Vision, for the—how many times has it been now? At least once for each of his twenty-eight phases of the Moon, surely, since I first picked up a battered paperback copy from a used book store in Seattle, one of those cramped and marvelous places…