Back to the Garden

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane. In my third year in college, I took a class from Prof. Cameron McKenzie on the Latter Prophets. It was a seminar style class that involved a crash course in Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern prophecy as well as a series of student paper-presentations on the book of Ezekiel. As this paper was worth the majority of our grade, we were all required to consult with Cameron on what we would be writing. It was in one of these meetings that Cameron introduced me to this philosopher who would go on to radically change how I read the whole bible. Eliade, a philosopher of religion, argues that across the ancient world there was generally a much more robust participatory ontology operating in the social imaginary than there is today. His discussion of types and archetypes was essential reading for me as preparation to engage the neo-platonism that underwrites Christian sacramentalism and Patristic exegesis. For anyone struggling to enter into the...

Kurt Wimmer's 2002 film, Equilibrium  gives us an interesting lens through which to view the Russian revolution of 1917 on this, its centennial. Set in the latter half of the 21st century, the world has passed through World War III and has attempted to construct a society in which war is no more (Woodrow Wilson is surely smiling up from the grave). To do so, the political elites have located the problem of war in the facts of human nature, specifically in our capacity to feel. It is our passions, in a passing homage to Girard, that are the root of the violence that manifests itself so devastatingly in war. The decision is made that to suppress our more base desires and passions, we must also sacrifice the heights of human emotion; joy, love, etc. Thus, a drug is created to produce an emotional equilibrium in the populace. Under the effects of this new opiate, peace is declared; a peace that is maintained by a para-military order of pistol wielding monks. On the surface, the movie...