Those Hell Blurbs

 ...and they rock so hard, there's no need for a description on the back. It's all there: 

Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology/Timothy Morton

  

“What a massive relief to have another book about the biggest disasters of our age from the hilarious, wise, and brilliant Timothy Morton. Wild and free, Tim’s ideas give me hope.”

—Laurie Anderson

 

“Timothy Morton journeys with the restless and radical spirit of William Blake through Hell, seeking synthesis and reconciliation between the methods of science and the spirit of religion. Signaling to us through the flames of their own personal hell, Morton shapes a space where we—freed from Cartesian subjectivity and the demands of old, vengeful gods—may glimpse the prospect of a new Jerusalem, one built on love.”

—David Dorrell, writer, curator, cofounder of LOVE, member of M/A/R/R/S

 

“Hell is an ecstatic sermon beamed in from another dimension, one far stranger and more human than our own. I often think that dimension is where Timothy Morton’s consciousness resides, and we are so very lucky for it.”

—Laura Hudson, journalist, editor, writer

 

“Reading Timothy Morton is something between watching a gifted comedian and experiencing a religious conversion. This book is classic Morton, and it’s more. It’s William Blake’s ‘mental fight’ reimagined for our contemporary world. It’s religion reloaded after a major born-again experience (yep), British colonialism, ecological catastrophe, and the efflorescence of diversity on every racial, sexual, and gender level one can imagine (and then some). Hell is a trip, and a flip. Get ready. You probably already are.”

—Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else

 

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University and director of the Cool America Foundation. They are the author of more than twenty books, including Hyperobjects, Dark Ecology, and Ecology Without Nature. Morton has collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Susan Kucera, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, and Olafur Eliasson.

 

978-0-231-21470-4 cloth

978-0-231-21471-1 paper

...yet I Did Get Carried Away into Aggression at Syracuse

 ...I'm really examining the micro actions, including speech, right now. I'm noticing how a strong desire to impress people led me to a cheap place, once, in my lecture at Syracuse. I talked about killing people, with relish. Something compelled me to go beyond what I was saying, which was about nonviolence. 

I am struck by how Gandhi says, you have to be ready to kill in order to be nonviolent, otherwise you're a coward. That was the context. Then I got carried away. 

There is a very seductive language of violence, for instance when it comes to ecological action. I was speaking out against blowing up a pipeline--it would only hurt nonwhite people, and nonhuman beings, and so on. But I felt I needed to prove that I was equally capable of imagining violence. 

I'm very grateful to my hosts, because this new project is bigger than Hyperobjects, and I truly need to gig it and road test it before I've really "thought" it, which his how that book became so incredibly great. 

Well that was great. Great, I tell you

 I'm about to get the shuttle to the airport in Syracuse NY after giving a lecture to about five hundred people at the Art Museum on the occasion of the opening of Assembly, a wonderful exhibition curated by Susannah Sayler and Ed Morris. They've produced a gorgeous book too, for which I'll be writing an essay. Thank you everyone! I road tested some Hell and it seemed to work really well. 

There are some very key neurological ideas, one very simple and another intriguing and deep, which line up with religion so beautifully. 

Read My First Theology / Philosophy Essay with Treena Balds

 QR takes you to it. 

Have You Joined My Patreon Yet?

 

Here it is 

Be There

HEL/L/OVE

 Avantgarden club, Houston, April 18. Hell launch party. Devilish DJs and libations. Be there. 

I Talk Theology for a Course on Contemporary Spirituality (interview)

 Big News: There is a huge resurgence of interest in Christianity in the UK in Green circles and I just accidentally wrote a book for you. I talk about all this and more: 

"Natural" and "organic" Now Deployed by the Ultra-Right

 ...once again proving a central argument of this, which made a case for "ecocriticism" as fascism lite:

Examples? Read this about the Taylor Swift panic. They're right to panic or course. Here is a white woman who doesn't suck, a white woman in an all-American girl embrace with a football star. Reminds you that their fascism is a dead end. I wondered why the previous president referred to the rabid supporters in New Hampshire as "organic."