Category: Spiritual Malady
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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Spirit
What Is Spirituality? The word spirit appears deceptively simple, yet its ambiguity conceals several fundamentally different ways of thinking. I will therefore avoid asking what the word means and instead ask what it refers to, since reference situates the term within a logical context rather than a private definition. The most immediate use of spirit…
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Spiritual Malady
Revised “There are those who forget that death will come to all. For those who remember, quarrels come to an end.”— The Dhammapada Addiction cannot be adequately understood when it is treated solely as a problem belonging to isolated individuals. What is commonly referred to as spiritual malady should not be conceived as a private…
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Spiritual Malady Cont’d
Bad Infinity (Hegel) Russell Brand captures something essential when he describes modern life as a carousel—perpetual motion without arrival, distraction masquerading as vitality, activity substituting for homecoming. The image is not merely poetic; it is diagnostic. What haunts the modern subject is not simply suffering, but the suspicion that beneath the noise there is nothing—no…