Well hello everyone, FINALLY it's a damp day in Houston after over two months of heat wave preceded by heat dome hyperobject hell. Talking of which, my book Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology is now in production at Columbia. Yay! We are expecting proofs to arrive in December.
Thinking is a team sport, and publishing is most assuredly a team sport, and I understand very well that the term "team player" is kind of horrible, but it does in fact describe me quite well.
You, dear reader, have helped me very much over the last couple of weeks, by suggesting journals and organizations and other outfits that might be keen to read or review or talk with me about Hell.
Now I'm curious about whether there are indeed any Christians following this blog; or Christian-curious or Exvangelical or otherwise oriented towards Christianity, or away from it. Please feel free to post a comment. If you're shy to do that, then please email me at tbm2@rice.edu. I understand that right now Christianity has a bad rap for all kinds of reasons, and that fessing up to it might be difficult.
So please know that Hell is not a criticism of Christianity, not a head-on one at any rate, but rather a critique in the Kantian or Adornian sense, a thorough exploration from the inside...but one that provides off-ramps for exvangelical people, as well as on-ramps...I can't help being a bit of a spirally deconstructive nonbinary person!
One reason for asking is, there has never been this much interest in my blog, and it's sustained. Interest has now surpassed what I call the "Björk spike" of 2015, when I announced that Björk and I had written a book. There was a huge spike in interest (about 200,000 people!). But now there's a kind of ridge of jagged peaks, they're smaller than that but in aggregate they're much larger.
Since I told you I was putting Hell together, interest in my blog has pretty much quadrupled. So this is a thing. So I want to find out whether I'm connecting to people not in my usual bailiwicks (philosophy, art, cultural criticism, ecological humanities, etc).
"Christian curious" doesn't cover it. I studied Blake and came to the conclusion I was a Christian in the same sense as him; animistic, in the tradition of the Ranters; seeing imagination as "the body of Christ"; but with a tendency toward universalism / Catholicism (in the spirit of someone like Thomas Merton). I have some thoughts along the lines of Altizer's 'Christian Atheism', and the idea that Christ's kenosis involved an 'emptying out' of himself into the world. The problem is that there is no modern church that corresponds to anything like these ideas.
ReplyDeleteI wrote an essay about why I see Blake as a Ranter, or in t he tradition of the Ranters, in terms of their common ideas in interpreting the Bible, here (skip to part two: Blake and the Ranters): https://travellerintheevening.substack.com/p/blake-and-the-mad-crew-ranters-and
Andy this is all incredibly interesting and powerful and I really like what you're writing here.
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