The connection between Jean-Luc Marion (1946-present) and Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), besides both being French, Catholic philosophers who each taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School, is "indeterminable hermeneutics." Ricoeur's work ...

It has long been noticed that there is a similarity between how the mind knows the world and how the physical world appears. For those in the Idealist camp this similarity is because our minds reflect the mind-like structures of reality. But mo...

The Epistle of John famously states that "God is Love." For Jean-Luc Marion this means that God's love came before God. Love is "God without Being." Love intends existence, but it doesn't exist in the way that things exist. Love "as" God-withou...

According to Acts, Paul went to the Aeropagus in Athens to preach to the Greek philosophers who apparently just sort of hung out there talking shit all day. He conveniently found a placard to an unknown god to illustrate the main point that he ...

When too much is given to the intention, there is too much aboutness, which is what Jean-Luc Marion calls a Saturated Phenomenon. Saturated Phenomena overwhelm us with too much aboutness to reduce to either a visible object or to the conceptual...

How does the mystic see ultimate reality? She sees it through analogy, as we have been discussing. Analogy is an indirect way of knowing through the prepositional "as," which connects something known to something unknown without making an equal...

Love is always becoming other than itself because love is characterized by self-emptying (Kenosis). Love opens possibilities, so it must clear away cancerous repetitions of the same, or as the phenomenological "Epoché"&nb...

The mystic uses analogy to have a direct experience of the divine, which is, of course, a paradoxical, if not an altogether nonsensical thing to say. Nonetheless, Analogy is a sort of immediate mediation of God's ultimate nature as love itself ...

Any predication that is made of God, such as "God is a rock," both discloses and hides God. As Meister Eckhart preached, "As God reveals Himself, he hides more deeply in His mystery. The central tenet of mysticism is, as Epistolary John wrote, ...

One of Jacques Lacan's most important discoveries was the relation between the desire to articulate in the register of the Symbolic and the failure of articulation in the Register of the Real. The Real is that which resists symbolization absolu...

Rudolph Otto explained that the "numinous" was an experience of something that was not reducible to rational explanation. These uncanny experiences were both terrifying and compelling. For Jacques Lacan the effect of the Real on the Symbolic al...

The concept of unconditional love is a non-transaction that nonetheless transfers what is valueless, or perhaps, invaluable to the Other without any countable worth, and without any guarantees or rewards. Unmerited grace has been a stumbling bl...

This is the episode in which I finally get to use the word "Mereology," which is the study of part-whole relationships. The word "holy" came into English through the Proto-Germanic root "haling," which meant whole, but it can be traced even fur...

Mircea Eliade believed that the religious impulse was to foreground the sacred against the background of the profane, which for him meant to differentiate an object from within a continuous homogeneity. He gave the example of someone drawing a ...

Homo Religiosus's intention is that the profane world be made sacred. But how is this accomplished? Mircea Eliade's answer in his The Sacred and the Profane was that she marks it as different. For Eliade what is homogeneo...

Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane and James George Frazer's The Golden Bough have been profoundly criticized for being Perennialist. The Perennial Philosophy sought unity among religious experiences, mythologies,...

Here it is, the original sin of comparative religions. I recklessly compare my "religious" experience at underground warehouse parties in the early 90's to the religious experiences of those participants at the festivals and religious rites at ...

Gobekli Tepe was closed up around 10,000 years ago. It was mysteriously, perhaps lovingly, preserved by filling in each of its otherworldly chambers with sediment. And after it was closed around 8,000 BC, it lay hidden just beneath the surface ...

There are two basic religious impulses. One is for control and the other is to lose it. Most religious expressions of modern times are to subordinate the other and elevate the chosen ones. Marx believed that "religion is the opiate" of the mass...

Yes, Gobekli Tepe! This one really rocked the anthropology and religious studies worlds. I'm so psyched to get to tell you about it. And I'm glad to be getting into some proper history of religions stuff. I love using music examples because the...

In philosophy being just is whatever there is, which is sometimes called the "Universe." But there is only one way for being to know itself, and that is to stand outside itself, so that it can get a good look at itself. If there is such a thing...

Deleuze and Lacan are incompatible, but I use them both to imagine how renewal occurs. Deleuze's "Desiring-Production" makes the world new by the purely positive desire for difference. However, Lacan's notion of ingressing difference into the w...

June Tyson chanting "Somebody else's idea of somebody else's world, it's not my idea of things as they are," is a sacred mantra, which functions as a divine "no" hovering above the futuristic vibrations of Sa Ra's Arkestra. This divine "no" ope...

When authenticity is defined by its opposition to performativity, it ironically becomes a performance. And as much as we in the Generation X loved irony, we preferred to enjoy ironically rather than get caught up in it ourselves. But, when you'...

I am continuing to try to develop the concept of an "authentic performance." My generation set up a false opposition between authenticity and performance, and the resulting failure didn't lead to freedom but to a regular-ass failure. I go on a ...