The Four Primary Drives: The Need for Meaning, the Need to Belong, the Need for Ideology, and the Spiritual Drive
Religious beliefs are primarily created and generated by four very basic and fundamental “Needs” or “Drives.” From a rather practical and pragmatic approach, in general, religions could be said to involve meaning or purpose, others…[Read more]

George Barton, PhD: “Disaster and sorrow compel either a soul or a nation to seek anew the foundations of life. Times of sorrow are accordingly times of religious growth. The Babylonian exile was no exception. Indeed, the influence of this exile upon the religion of Israel was enormous. This was in part due to the fact that the exile was the e…[Read more]

The Academic Materialist driven Extreme Escapism of Materialist Psychologists
and Jung’s Accurate “Mar’s Prophecy” – so Recently Proven True.
A journalist’s question to Carl Jung: Do you think that, in twenty years, anyone will care about the spirit of symbols, fully in the era of interplanetary journeys, with the Sputniks, the Gagarins, and…[Read more]

Three consecutive patriarchs of Esoteric Buddhism were Amoghavajra of India, Huiguo of China, and Kūkai of Japan. This paper foregrounds the usually taken-for-granted but vital historical role of language education and translation in the international spread of religion and culture. There had to be sufficiently educated bilingual or multilingual…[Read more]

There is an universal consensus among scientists that human beings are first and last social animals. IT would stand to reason then that relationships – and social consciousness – would be pivotal. In this complex society human beings simply would not be able to function is they didn’t have some form of functional social consciousness. Hinduism h…[Read more]

Einstein observed, “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration of this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.” As the p…[Read more]

This is pre-publication preview introduces the major questions, methods, and insights of my book When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis & the Reproduction of Species (UC Press, 2023).

In this essay, I argue that the temporal figure of latency is central for an understanding of the material temporalities of media. Latency as a tempo- ral figure is built into the material functioning of sound reproduction and audiovisual media. The discussion shows how latency underpins techni- cal processes of storing and reproducing sounds and…[Read more]

In lieu of an abstract, here is the beginning of the article… One of the most striking things about speculative literature of the twenty-first century has been its increasingly focussed interest in imagining impending disaster: from the escalating likelihood of biblical deluge on a planetary scale to looming ecocatastrophes of drought and…[Read more]

This article explores an emerging cluster of ecocatastrophe narratives that locate utopian possibility within the Earth’s sub-crustal lithosphere. Texts such as N. K. Jemisin’s “Broken Earth” trilogy (2015–2017), J. G. Ballard’s The Crystal World (1966), Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011), Irene Solà’s Catalan novel When I Sing, Mountains…[Read more]

Through the book Kūkai the Universal, the podcast guest discusses the life and times of Japan’s great saint Kūkai, Esoteric Buddhism, and Zen, in terms of East Asian history, language education, and translation issues including voice.

“The company builds cars and destroys men” was the promotional tagline of one of the posters for “Blue Collar” (1978). Shot in Detroit and Kalamazoo, Michigan, the film stars Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto playing three Detroit auto workers in financial despair who break into and rob the offices of their own union. “Blue Collar”…[Read more]

This is a review essay, originally contributed to a blog symposium, responding to the publication of Philip G. Ziegler’s book entitled Militant Grace: The Apocalyptic Turn and the Future of Christian Theology.

This Critical Exchange explores the nonhuman condition. It asks: What are the implications of decentering the human subject via a new materialist reading of radical democracy? Does this reading dilute political agency? Or should this be seen, on the contrary, as an invitation for new voices and demands to enter into democratic assemblages? How…[Read more]

An ecosystem theoretical and practical framework is posited for the evaluation and planning of advocacy, communication, public policies, research and teaching programmers, intertwining four dimensions of being-in-the-world (intimate, interactive, social and biophysical), as they combine, as donors and recipients, to induce the events…[Read more]

The Akkadian of this lexicon was spoken by Neolithic farmers who migrated to Europe from the Middle East starting around 6500 BCE. This lexicon combined with the new genetic migration information demonstrates that Europe had its own ancient Pagan civilization just as important and innovative as any other ancient civilization. This lexicon begins…[Read more]

The early history of the study of Parthian art may be profitably divided into three overlapping phases. The first phase, ‘Ordering’, begins with Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s dismissive assessment of Parthian art, at this point known mainly from coins, as derivative and barbaric. The second phase, ‘Exploration’, begins in the mid-ninet…[Read more]

पत्रकार और शिक्षाविद् प्रमोद रंजन ने जून, 2017 में हिमाचल प्रदेश के दुर्गम इलाकों की यात्रा की थी। इस यात्रा में उन्हें किन्नौर जिले के सुदूर गांव कानम के एक गोम्पा में सुमार नाम की जोमो मिलीं। जोमो यानी बौद्ध भिक्षुणी। मध्य हिमालय की अपूर्व शांति से भरी उस घाटी में सहज वात्सल्य से भरीं 56 वर्षीय सुमार के साथ कुछ घंटे बिताना उनके लिए एक अनूठा अ…[Read more]