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✨ About This Episode
The world is getting hotter, faster, stranger, and scarier every year. Species disappear each day, life-critical diversity replaced with media, consumer goods, capital, and trash. And yet…what do any of us feel inspired to do about it? Why has humankind thus far failed to wield its religions as an instrument for biospheric action? Reading the above probably generated more distress than motivation. Might Western civilization actually be better off reclaiming what the modern world felt it didn’t need — namely, the sacred? What if Christianity has ALWAYS at its core held teachings meant to stir up riotous love — the kind that gets us off our asses striving joyously to serve the living world we are?
Endlessly subversive author and Rice University Professor Timothy Morton (Twitter | Substack | Patreon | YouTube | Instagram) thinks so — and their new book Hell: In Search of A Christian Ecology argues eloquently for a weird and wonderful postmodern nondual Christianity in which we give up trying to run the place and realign ourselves with Life. Hell is a rousing and reviving work I underlined extensively, and our discussion traces and retraces Tim’s characteristically good-lurid and good-florid, stark-but-dreamy, mystically mundane, paradox-rich writing. We soar into romantic numinosity and dwell in body horrors, throw curtains open to pure light and celebrate the stains we can’t erase. Trigger warnings plenty, here — but one of them is that in the high-brow, low-brow oscillations you might find yourself awakened to the nature of your being-as-the-God-shaped-hole-in-everything.
I’ll let them introduce what is easily one of the most potent episodes this show has ever published:
“A wonderful three-dimensional podcast. Like, I can't thank you enough for wanting to go all the way around the mulberry bush and then into the mulberry bush and then outside the mulberry bush, then pulverize the mulberry bush into powder, send it around a particle accelerator, and watch the diffusion cloud chamber patterns as you compose another symphony using fractal geometry. I just love this.”
If that’s the kind of conversation you enjoy, then buckle up. Tim knows precisely the poetic mind-keys with which we can find The Garden in the flames of Hell itself, and Heaven in the sinful body of the Technocene.
Over the next two hours, we round the bases on a Greatest Hits of all my favorite topics, all of which appear in some sublime form in Tim’s wonderful new book. And we perform embroidery and exegesis of this anthem to raves and William Blake and AI and facing childhood trauma on the way to saving the biosphere from one of its own most deliciously sinful experiments (namely, civilization), we cover a kaleidoscopic swirl of topics such as:
• Making climate action (and America) cool again
• Nonduality, convergent evolution, and the sacred as the feeling of biology
• When teleology goes bad, then redeems itself through pluralism
• Flipped gnosticism and dispensing with master/slave thinking
• What deals with the devil teach us about how to wisely wield AI
• “The Black Goo” as a science fiction trope and how it relates to…
• How to make the best of living in Hell, aka social media
• The Peacock Angel Melek Taus and having sympathy for the devil
• Failure as comedy, sin as a blessing, thinking as a kind of failure mode
• Evolution as a Christic promise of possibility better futures, and yet…
• Why we shouldn’t use “emergentism” to solve “the meaning crisis”
We also pay dues to a totally prodigious list of inspirations.
As per our custom, those of you supporting the show have subsidized the extra time it takes for me to organize a thorough bibliography with links to the books, papers, films, TV shows, podcast episodes, and historical figures mentioned therein.
Thank you for listening and for your contributions!
✨ Support This Work
• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon
• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work
• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list
• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop
• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers
• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal
• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP
✨ Books & Articles
Hell: In Search of A Christian Ecology
by Timothy Morton
Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after The End of The World
by Timothy Morton
Subscendence
by Timothy Morton
Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of The Noosphere
by Richard Doyle
A Beginner’s Guide To Constructing The Universe
by Michael S. Schneider
The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection
by Charles Darwin
Liquid Modernity
by Zygmunt Bauman
Hallucination Is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models
by Ziwei Xu, Sanjay Jain, Mohan Kankanhalli
Unweaving The Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and The Appetite for Wonder
by Richard Dawkins
The Cloud of Unknowing
by Anonymous
The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us
by Nicholas Carr
Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
by Doug Rushkoff
At Home In The Universe: The Search for The Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity
by Stuart Kauffman
Complexity and The Emergence of Physical Properties
by Miguel Fuentes
The Return of the Black Madonna: A Sign of Our Times or How the Black Madonna Is Shaking Us Up for the Twenty-First Century
by Matthew Fox
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance
by Matthew Fox
Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
by J.F. Martel
✨ Podcast Episodes
SolPurpose Conversations 2 - Richard Doyle on The Cloud of Unknowing
75 - David Krakauer on Thinking Interplanetary with The Santa Fe Institute
132 - Erik Davis on Perturbations in the Reality Field
174 - Evan Snyder on Sound Design for A Robotic Built Wilderness
186 - A Manifesto for Weird Science
194 - Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions
212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere
Weird Studies 101 - Our Fear of the Dark: On Tanizaki's 'In Praise of Shadows'
✨ Movies & TV Shows
Alien
Westworld
Blade Runner
Hellraiser
Friends
Curb Your Enthusiasm
The Simpsons
Prometheus
The Shining
Alien Resurrection
Interstellar
The Wizard of Oz
✨ Other People
William Blake
Carl Hayden Smith
Jeffrey Kripal
Kurt Gödel
Georg Cantor
Alfred North Whitehead
Bertrand Russell
Gerald Manley Hopkins
Karl Marx
Slavoj Žižek
Gregory Bateson
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Philip K. Dick
E.F. Schumacher
Anna Holland
Phoebe Plummer
Francisco Varela
Humberto Maturana
Jacques Derrida
John Milton
Julian of Norwich
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
Jón Gnarr
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Murray Gell-Mann
✨ Objects Of Note
QAnon
Google Glass
The Sex Pistols
Cambridge Analytica
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