Category: Theology and Metaphysics
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Midnight Mass and the Completion of Transcendence
A Second Look Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass is often received as a religious horror story—a cautionary tale about fanaticism, blind faith, or the dangers of belief taken too far. Such readings remain trapped within a moral frame the series itself quietly abandons. Midnight Mass is not about the corruption of religion but about what religion…
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Alchemy, Resurrection, and the Long Unfolding of Modernity
(Complete Version) Our project has argued that modern addiction is not merely a medical contingency but a historically intelligible answer to a specific spiritual condition: the completion of transcendence and the relocation of “the Absolute” into operational systems (technique, administration, pharmacology, optimization). In that condition, obligation remains, but its traditional guarantees do not. The modern…
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“MIDNIGHT MASS”
When Resurrection Becomes a Drug (Abridged) There is a promise that keeps returning in modern life. It is not the promise that suffering will someday be redeemed, but that suffering can be ended now. Not endured, not worked through, not transformed over time—but stopped. This promise appears in substances, in technology, in optimization culture, and…
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Obligation After Transcendence (Revisited)
To Begin an Answer to Nihilism The collapse of transcendence does not abolish ethical obligation. It abolishes only the metaphysical guarantees that once explained why obligation binds. What remains is obligation without justification—demand without promise, claim without cosmology. The biblical tradition does not resist this condition. It anticipates it. Nowhere is this clearer than in…
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On the Absence of Premodern Counterexamples
A likely objection to the present framework concerns its apparent historical exclusivity: namely, whether the psychic structure here designated Born Man admits of premodern or non-modern analogues, thereby undermining its claim to modern specificity. Traditions such as Stoicism, late antique inwardness, Indian non-dualism, Buddhist reflexivity, Greek tragedy, or medieval mysticism may appear, at first glance,…
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Modernity, Alienation, and Addiction: A Hegelian Genealogy
Contemporary addiction is typically approached as a medical disorder, a behavioral pathology, or a moral failure. Each of these frames captures a dimension of the phenomenon, yet none explains why addiction emerges with such structural regularity in modern societies, nor why it so often appears precisely where freedom, autonomy, and rationalization are most advanced. To…
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Why Modern Christian Explanation Is Inadequate
Faith After Belief, Meaning After God Modern Christianity does not fail because it is false. It fails because it continues to explain where it must now undergo. Its deepest inadequacy is neither moral weakness nor institutional decay, but a fundamental category error: Christianity has come to treat itself as a system of answers in a…
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Endurance Without Consolation
The Epistle of James and the Ethical Prehistory of Born Man The Epistle of James occupies an uneasy position within the New Testament canon. Long perceived as ethically severe, theologically austere, and resistant to systematic integration with Pauline doctrine, James has often been treated as a corrective, an anomaly, or even a regression. Yet when…
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Longsuffering and the Burden of Time
Makrothymia, ’Erekh Appayim, and the Ethical Legacy of Endurance Among the ethical terms inherited by Christianity from the ancient world, few are as easily misunderstood—and as historically consequential—as μακροθυμία (makrothymia), commonly translated as “longsuffering” or “patience.” In modern usage the term is often reduced to emotional calm or passive waiting. In its original Greek, Jewish,…
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“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…