The Logic of Addiction

State of the Art. Cutting Edge. Cultural Psychology and Addiction.

  • Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)

    Dracula and the Cultural Logic of Addiction Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) can be read as one of the earliest and most coherent cultural articulations of addiction—not as a pathology located in an individual brain, but as a systemic logic that reorganizes desire, identity, and social order. Long before addiction was framed in pharmacological or behavioral…

  • “God Is Love”

    From Johannine Ontology to Dantean Cosmology Among the most uncompromising claims in the Christian tradition is the Johannine assertion that “God is love” (1 John 4:8). This declaration is neither metaphor nor moral encouragement; it is an ontological statement concerning the nature of ultimate reality. Divine being is here identified without remainder with agapē. More…

  • Addiction as Heresy

    Batman v Superman and the Crisis of Salvation After God: A Second Look Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) is typically discussed as a failed superhero epic or an ideologically confused blockbuster. Yet such readings overlook the film’s deeper coherence. Read through the Old and New Testaments, the apocryphal and Gnostic traditions gathered in…

  • Alcoholism and Modernity

    From Ritual Excess to Existential Compulsion Alcohol has been present in Western societies for millennia, and excessive drinking is neither new nor uniquely modern. Yet alcoholism, as it is now understood, is a distinctly modern phenomenon. The difference lies not in physiology or access to alcohol, but in the symbolic, theological, and cultural worlds in…

  • Alcoholism and Modernity Part II

    Twelve-Step Theology and Cinema as Metaphysical Discourse Our discussion has repeatedly argued that modern addiction cannot be adequately understood as a medical disorder, moral failing, or behavioral compulsion alone. Rather, addiction emerges historically as a response to a civilizational rupture: the collapse of transcendence in Western modernity coupled with the persistence of metaphysical longing. Alcoholism,…

  • Grace, Law, and the Fear of Power

    New Testament Logic in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Introduction The New Testament is less a moral code than a crisis text. It emerges at a moment when authority has lost credibility, law has become punitive rather than redemptive, and inherited structures can no longer secure meaning. Its central question is not whether power…

  • Watchmen: Salvation After God and After Man.

    Watchmen begins where both Christianity and humanism have already failed. God is absent. Meaning is exhausted. History no longer believes in progress. What remains is power—naked, ironic, technologically amplified—and the question the New Testament and Nietzsche each pose in opposite ways: Who bears responsibility for the world when transcendence is gone? The film does not answer…

  • False Gods After God

    The Boys and the Crisis of Modern Meaning The Boys is not, at its core, a satire of superheroes. It is a drama about what happens after transcendence collapses, but its symbols remain. The series stages a world where god-images persist without God, power persists without meaning, and morality persists without grounding. What results is…

  • Clyde Bruckman and the Way Scully Listens

    X-Files Season 3 Episode 4 Clyde Bruckman knows how everyone dies. He doesn’t say this proudly. He doesn’t say it dramatically. He says it the way someone mentions the weather when it’s already too late to change it. The knowledge hasn’t made him powerful. It’s made him careful. Gentle. Tired. He sees death everywhere, but…

  • Sophia

    The Soul of History Sophia was not born when the world was whole. She arrived only after the first fracture—after certainty had learned to speak too loudly, after order had begun to mistake itself for truth. She did not appear as a rival to Logos, but as what remained when Logos had said everything it…