Category: Books
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Getting High…in 1753 | The Gin Craze
‘In all history there’s never been a culture in the world that didn’t have some drug of some kind to lift people out of themselves.’ Poverty, war, terrifying religion and women experiencing liberation… Could so equally have written Getting High about the Gin craze era of the mid 1700s 🙂 In Our Time, brilliant, as…
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‘If You Don’t Like My Peaches, Don’t Shake My Tree’
Brilliant response from Shirley Jackson (who would have been 100 today) to a nasty letter from a reader. Love it 🙂 via @InterestingLit
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Can We Talk About Radical Theology and Alcohol?
In the past few posts about the bigger political, technological and cultural shifts that might be going on behind the ‘fake news’ scandal, I’ve proposed how Radical Theology might have in helping people to critique political and religious illusions. However, I’ve also mooted that Radical Theology could itself become a means by which the hard…
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Creating Freedom, by Raoul Martinez
This looks like a very worthwhile read. Comes highly recommended, and if you’re interested in understanding and acting in these strange times, sounds like one for the Christmas list. From the review in The Guardian: Creating Freedom is, in part, a mashup of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, James Lovelock’s The Revenge of Gaia, Thomas…
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Don’t Tread Softly (Though You Tread on My Dreams)
It’s always a strange time in the run up to a book being published. Mostly, there’s a sense of excitement. But there’s also a degree of nervousness. Will people ‘get it’? Will people think it’s any good? I was thinking about this the other day, and was reminded of Yeats’ poem The Cloths of Heaven:…
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Keep On Nailing It: The Constant Work of Putting Gods to Death
With just a few weeks to go until Getting High is out – see post below – I thought I’d post a short excerpt from the closing chapter. For some context: what I’ve done in the preceding pages is to explore how our various attempts at flight are connected with religious moves to attain access…