Aeneas in Washington: “You can tell by the blood streaks on his face that he had yet to wipe any of it away. His hands are in penitent repose, palms slightly up. Out of context he appears to be in genuflection. It is at this moment, in all likelihood, that he first tasted the blood, first realized he’d been shot, first became aware that his life had been spared.”
From LSD to Christ: “…on a cold March day in Kansas, she was baptized in a freezing lake, ‘which accomplished something holy, something monumental, something unseen but no less real for it.'”
Heresy Costs: “Extreme devoutness may be a prerequisite for holiness, as piety for sanctity, but should not be mistaken for it. Our mental maps of reality, our delusions and disordered dogmas…really matter. How you see the world will likely determine how you leave it.”
The Moses Option: “Mythologist Joseph Campbell had some advice about the correct road to take at times like these:
Schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the disintegrating elements. Only birth can conquer death – the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.
“Campbell was no Christian, but he knew what the Void represented, and he knew too what had to be done when the end of a culture arrived:
Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified – and resurrected; dismembered totally and then reborn.”
The Return of the King: “The Emperor of Austria once told Theodore Roosevelt that his job was to protect his people from their politicians. It was to this ideal, this archetype that Trump ascended. If it can be said of a man in his seventies, he matured, but went far beyond that in becoming a kind of patriarch, possessed of more charisma, gravitas, and personal authority. The Mandate of Heaven settled upon him.”
Was Nietzsche Right About Christianity? The Genealogy of Morals vs. the Book of John: “…if you are really committed to the truth, then in all of your creative expressions and all of your Dionysian vigor, you’re going to inevitably be expressing God. You’re going to be inevitably honoring God simply because you are, in fact, aligned to the one true order of things, the Logos, the word of God and Christ’s word.”