Heretical musings on religion and culture from a literary scholar
I'm working on a paper for an Apocalypse conference in Romania the details are fuzzy, but I wanted to make some notes to come back to later. In short, the majority of contemporary post-apocalyptic YA novels are about Revolution. Unlike classic dystopian fiction like 1984 or even the more modern Never Let Me Go show a reality that can't be escaped from. Resistance is really futile, if not only because systems of bio-power have nullified any ...
Thanks to New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman's new book "Did Jesus Exist", the debate over the historical Jesus has reached mainstream. Today CNN posted an article about called The Jesus debate: Man vs. myth Interestingly, the only "Mythicist" writers they quote from are Robert Price (author of the Price, author of “Deconstructing Jesus “Deconstructing Jesus" published in 2000) and Timothy Freke (co-author of "The Jesus Mysteries: Was the ‘Original Jesus’ a Pagan God?" published in 2001). According ...
Yesterday I read Graham Hancock's Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind (2007). Basically, without coming to any conclusion or positing any credible theory, the purpose of the book is to point out some pretty astounding similarities between ancient pre-historic cave drawings, traditional accounts of fairy lore, modern scientific experiments with DMT, and alien abduction testimonies. Shamans from many world cultures have used combinations of plants to communicate with "higher-beings" of some kind who teach them things. ...
If you're looking for a late-summer read, check out the book "Jesus Potter Harry Christ." It claims that both Harry and Jesus are spiritual metaphors told in the literary form of historical fiction. The paperback is selling well on amazon, but we'd like to print hardcover copies - so we've set up a page on kickstarter.com where you can get a better deal and some great freebies by supporting the project. Thanks! Click here for the ...
This summer I had the rare experience of sitting around and reading great books in a log cabin by log Tahoe (unlike Thoreau, I didn't build it with my hands). One of the books I enjoyed was "A Brain Wider than the Sky" by Andrew Levy. As a migraine sufferer myself, I was looking for confirmation (which I found) that many famous writers and artistic geniuses suffered from migraines, and that in fact the pain, ...
"Penn Jillette is a twenty-first-century Lord of Misrule: big, boisterously anarchic, funny, Rabelaisian, impossible and unique. There isn't--couldn't be--better not be--anybody like him." --RICHARD DAWKINS, bestselling author of The Greatest Show on Earth and The God Delusion So begins the hype over Penn Jillette's new book "God, no! Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales." I just saw Penn on a TV interview and the kindle version of his book will be delivered ...
Last Month Chuck Colson - Christian leader, cultural commentator, and former Special Counsel for President Richard Nixon - commented on my book, Jesus Potter Harry Christ. His central criticism of my book is weak, desperate and unfounded - in fact I write quite a bit about CS Lewis and Tolkien in the book so I doubt Colson has read more than the introduction or summary. But I'd like the opportunity to address the issue, which ...
A big part of the research I've been doing in the past decade has focused on historical Jesus research: how much of the gospel story is literature, and how much (if any) is based on firm historical fact. For my Master's thesis in comparative literature, I tied in this research with the fictional character of Harry Potter, to demonstrate that Jesus, like Harry, may have been a cumulative adaptation of many previous mythologies. Now that the ...
Danielle Tumminio, the Author of "God and Harry Potter at Yale" has posted an article at Huffingtonpost.com about Harry Potter and Christianity. I'm jealous, because the article is basically a timely tease for her book - and I'd love my own Huffpost article but haven't figured out how to exploit the system for self-promotion. (With the release of Deathly Hallows 2 next week, I think a lot of people will be searching for more info ...
If you're interested in religious mythology, astrological symbolism, or supernatural folklore, grab my book Gods of Myth and Man. You can go buy it on Amazon.
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