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Research into the Cognitive Neuroscience of Spirituality at the University of Otago

12 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by Luke Johns in Academics, Religion

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Australian desert, Beauty, Brain of Melchizedek, Cognitive Neuroscience, Divine Revelation, Goodness, Grant Gillett, Harmony, Jeffery Jonathan Davis, Joshua, Master of Science, Melchizedek, Otago University Research Archive, OUR Archive, Paradise Landing, PBRF, Performance-Based Research Fund, Spiritual Values, Spirituality, truth, University of Otago

In 2009, Jeffery Jonathan (“Joshua”) Davis submitted a Masters thesis to the University of Otago which examines the cognitive neuroscience of “spirituality”. The scientific thesis is entitled, “The Brain of Melchizedek: A Cognitive Neuroscience Approach to Spirituality”. The University of Otago has recently been publishing Honours, Masters, and PhD theses online, as part of its Otago University Research Archive (“OUR Archive”). Davis’s Masters thesis, supervised by Grant Gillett, earned him a Master of Science with Credit in 2010, and is available to read online in pdf format.

But a few of its key scientific findings are worth highlighting here.

Davis explains that his broad goal is:

to understand and communicate the neuro-genetic implications of Spiritual and Behavioural Values to the attainment of Social Harmony and Peace. This is why the thesis bears the name “The Brain of Melchizedek”, in honour to the King of Righteousness, The King of Peace (as portrayed in the Torah) the bearer of a brain encoded with a map to living in harmony and peace. (p. ii)

Davis distinguishes Religious Beliefs from Spiritual Values in a manner that may be familiar from mainstream popular culture:

Religious Beliefs are associated with Behavioural Values while Holiness, Wholeness and the State of Being Peace is associated with Spiritual Values available to any human being regardless of his or her behavioural map of reality. (p. v; cf. p. 3)

Davis claims not to follow any Religious Beliefs, but to uphold what he sees as the spiritual “essence” of figures such as Jesus (“Yeshua ben Yosef”) or Melchizedek:

What is important here regardless of the reader’s belief about the existence of people like Melchizedek and Yeshua Ben Yosef is the kind of wisdom and understanding about consciousness that their words and actions carry both in joyful or adversary situations. These characters and personalities identify themselves with The Creator’s essence and attributes and are inviting their fellow human beings to embrace the possibility to tap into the spiritual nature of human existence to find peace and harmony and to develop a brain capable of a higher cognitive map attuned to God’s Consciousness and the universe at large, its environment. (p. 5)

Despite his purported rejection of specific religious traditions, Davis sees fit to warn “theists, agnostics or Buddhists who are unacquainted with a personal relationship with The Creator” of the “extremely high cost” of rejecting the existence of a Creator, even if the probability of such is shown – by material, non-spiritual, empirical methods – to be very low (pp. 5-6). This allusion to Pascal’s Wager, together with his adherence to Jesus perhaps indicate the particular colour of his allegedly “universal” Spiritual Values. Davis also issues

an invitation for the reader to find the ‘Voice of God’ within their own garden of consciousness where the seeds of the Tree of Life have been planted to allow those ones who will embrace this exploration in the manner of a Tzadik/Scientist or Prophet/Scientist to taste of the fruits of this tree. Spiritual Values like Love, Grace, Truth, Certainty to name a few might eventually lead to one of those ‘aha’ moments in which a person can discern for him or herself what kind of behaviours and lifestyles are more akin to the expression of those universal and transcendental experiences suited to his or her own Personality, Character, Identity, and cultural and social context, the expression of his or her I AM Identity in the world. (p. 9)

Although his thesis is partly grounded in a scattering of quotes from scholars, ranging from neuroscientists to quantum physicists, Davis bases his thesis centrally on “spiritual wisdom … derived from my personal relationship with the Creator (revelation and insights)” (p. v):

As you read this work you will realize that most of the words of Torah and the stories of Israel are treated as my own instead of being quoted the way any other references are quoted. This is because I am one with the body, a fundamental part in the unity of this unbroken chain of divine revelation, both physically and spiritually (p. 4).

In this regard, Davis notes that he wrote an earlier work, Paradise Landing, after receiving it as a “Divine Revelation … in the desert of Australia” (p. 1). The University of Otago has kindly also made this “Divine Revelation” available on its academic website. As Davis explains in the Introduction to his Masters thesis,

Paradise Landing contains twenty one prayers of twenty one different Spiritual Values whose source is the Source of All Life. The prayers are grouped by seven colours and the three values associated to the fifth level or colour are Energy, Mastery and Triunity, mathematically referred as 555 in the context of the revelation and also associated to colour blue as in the light spectrum of blue. (p. 1)

Davis claims to be attempting no less than a synthesis of Science and Spirituality, subjectivity and objectivity, the material and immaterial realms. Accordingly, the proper point of departure for such an endeavour, he claims, is not in any traditional academic procedure or methodology, but in a prayer to “the Triunity” of “Father-Mother-Love” – and this he sets out in full in his Introduction (p. 2). Davis ambitiously seeks to prove that “the spiritual field, the quantum field and the matter field are intrinsically and dynamically interwoven together, as are mind, body and soul, part of an underlying unity which is only dichotomized through the accidents of limited perception and linguistic limitations” (pp. 4-5).

Davis notes that the Spirit has led him, in “childlike playfulness”, to address the reader as “Dear Reader” thoughout the thesis. The same Spirit licensed him to refer to “some authors by their first name to relate to them in an intimate, personal, intersubjective way” (6). Indeed, the thesis is punctuated with almost as many “Dear Reader”s as irregular capitalisations – the latter feature which he explains in this way:

Words like Personality, Character and Identity which I am attributing to a personal gift of The Creator in a personal spiritual relationship have also been capitalized, along with all the names of the Source of all Spiritual Values like for example The Creator, the Most High God, I Am the Love, or Unity to name a few, because of the sacredness and special meaning that they uphold for my person, my immediate blood line, the family of Israel at large, both the known and the lost tribes of Israel and the majority of the people who still stand in awe and reverence to those names, essences and inner spaces in all cultures, traditions and beliefs for all times.

In four chapters, Davis pieces together a tissue of quotations from various scientists, philosophers, and theologians who defend a spiritual dimension to humankind, who “allow themselves to move beyond the materialistic view of human function” (p. 17). This has the further consquence of providing

an open door to find meaning and inspiration to explore a universe which is populated with caring, loving and constructive human beings, a paradigm which sees Goodness, Beauty, Truth and Harmony available to all creatures (and particularly scientists, philosophers and theologians) to overcome selfishness, fear, greed, and ignorance based on transitional and temporal structures for physical survival, destructive behaviour and war.

Have a read of Jeffery Jonathan (“Joshua”) Davis’s complete thesis on the University of Otago academic research website, OUR Archive.

The University of Otago received first place among all New Zealand universities in the Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF) review in 2010. Academic performance is matched by its financial success: total revenue for the University of Otago in 2010 from student fees and other sources was $586,400,000, and the net surplus  (before unusual and non-recurring items) was $34,500,000. This is  up from $304,200,000 total revenue and $7,000,000 net surplus in 2000.

On the Origins of Management Science

16 Wednesday Dec 2009

Posted by Alan Smithee in Language, Living

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

education, fraud, Frederick Winslow Taylor, management, PBRF, scientific management, The New Yorker

As has been noted here in the past,and more than once, by other members of this site, business-inspired organisational models based on esoteric ideas like ‘performance’ and ‘results’ have permeated and even come to define the contemporary university, much for the worse of everyone involved.  We know it here in New Zealand chiefly in the form of the much-maligned Performance Based Research Funding system, which has given many scholars a new four-letter word, ‘PBRF’.

091012_r18902_p233

Illustration from The New Yorker, 12 October 2009

Not only is this style of management and organisation leading to a fundamental change in the way that universities are staffed (more and more people are teaching part-time with little access to benefits, research funding, or other essential things), but it also discourages innovation (many scholars will only publish in the highest-rated journals, which tend towards conservative content in areas that are well established and amply covered), takes valuable time away from teaching (which causes students, who have already been severely let down by performance-managed primary and secondary schools, to suffer as well at the altar of the management ethos), and causes scholars to spend an inordinate amount of time justifying their existence (or at least their dwindling salaries) rather than doing to kinds of work – reading, writing, thinking, teaching – that they should be doing, the kinds of work that they have been doing for centuries.

All of this, it turns out, and as a great many of us have long expected, to be rooted, fundamentally, in very bad science and on the worst kind of exploitative capitalism.  On a recent read through a recent edition of The New Yorker, I happened upon an article discussing the beginnings of the ‘scientific management’ craze in the early twentieth century, a movement that has led, and fairly directly, to the universities of today, which are run like businesses, despite the very obvious fact that this is a very bad model for running an educational institution.  The founder of the movement, which has now pervaded the social sphere to an alarming degree, one Frederick Winslow Taylor, an industrial engineer from Philadelphia who later earned the nickname ‘Speedy Taylor’, based his work on a series of studies that were badly flawed or simply fabricated.  Jill Lepore writes:

Whether he was also a shameless fraud is a matter of some debate, but not, it must be said, much: it’s difficult to stage a debate when the preponderance of evidence falls to one side …  Taylor’s enemies and even some of his colleagues pointed out, nearly a century ago [that] Taylor fudged his data, lied to his clients, and inflated the record of his success.

So all of this – the publishing quotas, the rating of journals, the need to court and treat students as customers – is based on lies, on inflations, and on the sort of sloppy, dishonest science that we in the academy should be dedicated to combating.

Again, to the surprise of very few people, the decision to apply capitalistic models of what is valuable and, thus, ultimately is allowable within society, is as disastrous for education as it is has been for health care and the environment (carbon-trading schemes, anyone?).

What the solution is for universities, save for open revolution, is anyone’s guess – and who has time for rebellion when trying to publish books and articles that no other scholar is going to have the time to read?  If anyone out there has a brilliant idea as to how to begin to undo the damage that Taylor and his later supporters – like Louis Brandies (and the trade unions called foul on ‘scientific management’ from the very first, which in itself is damning) and Lillian Gilbreth, who for unfathomable reasons brought the principles of scientific management into the home – have inflicted on the universities of the world, I’m all ears.

Dysenchanted Worlds: Rationalisation, Dystopia, and Therapy Culture in Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit

25 Friday Sep 2009

Posted by Eric Repphun in Death, History, Language, Literature, Living, Religion, Rhetoric, Texts

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Children of Men, commodification, disenchantment, dystopia, Georges Bataille, Henning Mankell, Jean Baudrillard, Kurt Wallander, Logan's Run, Max Weber, Never Let Me Go, New Age, Ninni Holmqvist, PBRF, rationalisation, Sweden

Proving that we here in the Dunedin School are interested in books other than the Bible, we turn our attention in quite another direction and continue our ongoing discussion of rationalisation – or disenchantment – and human society (see more on this here, here, here, here, and here).

Whoever pushes rationality forward also restores new strength to the opposite power, mysticism and folly of all kinds.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Right now, no-one else is doing fictional social commentary about the continuing process of rationalisation quite as well as Scandinavians.  From Jens Lien’s lithe, brilliant 2006 Norwegian film The Bothersome Man, which envisions the afterlife as a sterile, highly controlled modern city, to Let the Right One In, which unearths an unspeakable, timeless evil living on the perfectly planned streets of Stockholm (or perhaps this evil is created by or drawn to the city because of its inhuman perfection), there is a whole host of powerful narratives emerging from the northern reaches of Europe, narratives which seriously question the social costs of quantification and reduction of all things, human life included, to exchangeable commodities.n59473

To these more fanciful works, we need to add the growing numbers of excellent Swedish crime fiction, a list which must include Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (along with the two other titles in his Millennium Trilogy), which puts a very human face on the immense suffering and violence that goes on, unnoticed and unremarked, in the interstices of rationalised societies.  The gold standard here is probably set by Henning Mankell’s brilliant Kurt Wallander detective novels, which are so popular in Germany that Mankell outsells J.K. Rowling.  Over the course of nine novels, Wallander, a kind of dishevelled, stoic, and utterly baffled Everyman, fights a losing battle against a tide of violence and senseless crime in what should, by all accounts, be an earthly paradise of social planning, a triumph of the welfare state.  The Wallander novels are shot through with a crawling sense of dread that is shocking not because it is so out of place in the quiet towns of southernmost Sweden, but because it quickly becomes so natural,  because it feels so familiar.  Mankell turns what could be boilerplate police procedurals into both a highly-nuanced character study and a far-ranging, even courageous theodicy that could only have emerged out of one of the most secular nations on earth.  The Wallander novels amount cumulatively to a systematic interrogation of the failures of the welfare state and a deconstruction of the social engineering promises that were made so easily, and with remarkably little foresight, in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.  (Incidentally, for the uninitiated, the suburb English-language BBC production Wallander, with a doughy and heartbreakingly human Kenneth Branagh as Wallander is a great point of entrée into Mankell’s world; for those of you who still read books,  I’ll recommend 1995’s Sidetracked as a personal favourite among the novels).

To this illustrious list we should now add Ninni Holmqvist’s compelling and unjustly overlooked first novel The Unit (2006), an examination of the failures of the present through the classical allegorical strategy of the dystopia.  The story is told by Dorrit Weger, a fifty-year-old woman who, as the novel opens, has been moved to something called ‘the Unit’, about which the reader knows nothing.  As the story unfolds through Holmqvist’s quiet, precise, understated prose, we learn only gradually what the Unit is and why Dorrit finds herself there.  In the future Sweden in which the novel is set – and its exact timeframe is ambiguous, though it is not too far in the future – anyone who has reached the end of their usefulness to society is taken to the Unit, where they are used for medical experiments and as living organ banks, forced to donate their organs one by one until they donate a vital organ, say the heart or the lungs.  ‘Final donation’ is in fact the Unit’s callous euphemism for death.  Dispensable Elsa, in an attempt to be light-hearted about her fate, jokes with her friend Dorrit, ‘We’re like free-range pigs or hens.  The only difference is that the pigs and hens are – hopefully – hopefully ignorant of anything but the present’.[1]

TheUnit - Ninni Holmqvist

This is no prison camp, however, at least not in the traditional sense and this, for some reason, just makes the fate of Dorrit and her fellow ‘dispensables’ all the more repellent.  The Unit is an immaculately constructed alternative world with no view of the outside.  It is a prison, without question, but it is a comfortable prison.  There are shops, gardens, healthy restaurants, and plenty of amusements.  Everything is clean, rational, and as humane as such a thing could possibly be.  The dispensables, within the confines of their role as human capital, are treated with respect and encouraged to pursue their own interests and look after their own (decidedly relative) wellbeing.  Neither is the selection of people for the Unit random or unexpected; the selection criteria are highly rational, highly quantified, and systematised to remove those all-too-human elements of chance and luck.  Anyone who does not work in a vital field – teaching, nursing, etc. – and who remains childless is destined for a one-way trip to the Unit when they reach a certain age.  For women, the cut-off age is fifty, while for men it is sixty.  Even this has a rational justification; male sexual function has a slightly longer life-span than female, thus men retain their usefulness for longer.

The Unit is many things: it is a moving study of the intense and genuine friendships that quickly develop within the pressure cooker atmosphere of the Unit among people who know they have, at most, a few years left to live; when Dorrit meets Johannes and falls in love, it is a refreshing (and refreshingly frank) study of a sexual relationship between two characters past middle age, a time of life that most popular fiction, Harold and Maude notwithstanding, renders oddly asensual; and, in the end, it is simply heartbreaking, especially when Dorrit reminisces about her simple life outside the Unit and about her dog Jock, who she was forced to leave with friends when she taken to away.

In the final analysis, what The Unit, with its focus on the usefulness or utility of human beings, is criticising is rationalisation, the increasing dominance of instrumental reason, and how this effects people living in rationalised societies.  What matters in a rationalised or disenchanted system is what works, not what has meaning.  Only that which conforms to a narrowly-defined idea of function has proper, demonstrable value.  Those in Holmqvist’s dystopian future who find themselves in the Unit fall outside the brutal calculus of value that equates usefulness with the biological necessity of reproduction.  The world that supports the Unit is thus in this sense a subsistence economy that places the highest interest in its own survival.  Holmqvist makes it apparent that members of the Unit have internalised this value system, as we see Dorrit fretting, even after being labelled as dispensable, about being ‘unusable’ as a medical commodity within the Unit itself.  She also spends much of her time – tellingly, she follows standard week-day working hours even while inside the Unit – writing a novel about a mother who gives birth to a deformed baby, in which she muses, ‘The question was: Is this mother to be regarded as a parent in the practical, concrete meaning of the word?  Is she to be regarded as needed?  The question was: Is a person needed if she gives birth to a child that will never be able to bond with her, and will never be able to make any kind of contribution?’[2]

Rationalisation, first theorised by the sociologist Max Weber in early years of the twentieth century, has arguably held up better than its contemporary, the secularisation thesis.  There are a number of sociologists, theorists (including yours truly), and philosophers who have done some very interesting work within a Weberian framework, working with what Weber famously called ‘the disenchantment of the world’.  One of the more prominent of these thinkers is Georges Bataille, who captures the long and ultimately indeterminate struggle between instrumental and values-based rationalities when he writes of ‘the poverty of utility’.  Bataille’s related concepts of accursed share and sovereignty have strong resonances with both Weber’s disenchantment and Jean Baudrillard’s concept of symbolic exchange.  Bataille’s concept of the sovereign is also related, not coincidentally, with his challenging theory of religion, which in turn owes a good deal to Weber’s narrative of rationalisation and its identification of religious and economic history.[3] Echoing Jean Baudrillard’s concept of ‘symbolic exchange’, which celebrates the extra-economic and extra-instrumental use of goods, Bataille writes critically of the ‘servile man’, who ‘averts his eyes from that which is not useful, which serves no purpose’.[4] He opposes the servile to the sovereign: ‘The sovereign I speak of has little to do with the sovereign of States, as international law defines it.  I speak in general of an aspect that is opposed to the servile and the subordinate’.[5] The sovereign, then, stands apart from and opposed to the closed system of political economy, as does symbolic exchange; indeed, Bataille champions the ‘opposition to the mercantile spirit, to haggling and self-interested calculation’ that is embodied in true exchange.[6] In the world of The Unit, human beings are understood only in relationship to their use value and are thus granted different levels of exchange value in a brutal, mercenary logic where a single older woman is worth demonstrably, quantifiably less than a young single mother of young boys.  There is a good deal that this kind of instrumentalisation misses, of course, and Weber, when formulating his theory of rationalisation, noted that disenchantment carries with it necessarily a dehumanising element.  When Dorrit finds out her sister had been in the same Unit and had died a few years previously, she rages against the narrowness of this calculus of value: ‘But what about me?  Perhaps I needed my sister, why doesn’t anyone think about things like that?’[7]

Though exploitative medical practices and the disposal of the aged are classic themes in dystopian fiction, from Michael Bay’s patently awful film The Island to the classic (both in novel and film form) Logan’s Run, to Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (soon to be released as a film), The Unit is still compelling, neccessary reading, due in no small part to the fact that it is far more grounded in the realities of the disenchanted, rationalised world than many of these other texts. After all, what makes any dystopia work is that it is believable.  This is why Alfonso Cuaron’s film Children of Men is so striking, so haunting: it is chillingly plausible; its account of the future is so convincing as to seem almost inevitable.  What makes Holmqvist’s nightmare so recognisably grounded in our reality is that she draws out the connections between rationalisation and commodification, which are inextricably linked in consumer capitalism.  Dorrit tells a friend:

I used to believe that my life belonged to me … Something that was entirely at my disposal, something no one else had any claim on, or the right to have an opinion on.  But I’ve changed my mind.  I don’t own my life at all, it’s other people who own it … Those who have the power, I suppose … The state or industry or capitalism.  Or the mass media.  Or all four.  Or are industry and capitalism the same thing?  Anyway: those who safeguard growth and democracy and welfare, they’re the ones who own my life.  They own everybody’s life.  And life is capital.  A capital that is to be divided fairly among the people in a way that promotes reproduction and growth, welfare and democracy.  I am only a steward, taking care of my vital organs.[8]

As a condemnation of an increasingly rationalised world where everything and, more importantly, everyone, can become a unit of economic value, The Unit is a very fine novel and a nice bit of social criticism.  However, there is something going on further in the depths of the text that should be immensely troubling to anyone invested in the idea of therapy.  That the usual therapies of our world go on unhindered with the Unit, that Doritt regularly visits a psychologist, or that art therapy is available to the doomed residents, suggests something deeply subversive; that the whole therapeutic ethos that dominates contemporary European cultures, with its rhetoric of healing, wholeness, mind-body unity, self-awareness, and self-fulfilment and its social structure of support groups, twelve-step programs, talk therapy, is nothing more than an integral part of the rationalised and rationalising apparatus that prepares and maintains human capital.  That very few of the people who work at the Unit (though they live outside of it) have any intimation of the sheer hypocrisy of the whole enterprise is telling of the perverse coexistence of the recognisable world of therapy and the utterly ruthless logic of exploitation and violence that exists behind the whole edifice of the Unit.  Slavoj Žižek gets at this point in his contributions to the recent The Monstrosity of Christ:

Spiritual mediation, in its abstraction from institutionalised religion, appears today as the zero-level undistorted core of religion: the complex institutional and dogmatic edifice which sustains every particular religion is dismissed as a contingent secondary coating of this core.  The reason for this shift of accent from religious institutions to the intimacy of spiritual experience is that such a meditation is the ideological form that best fits today’s global capitalism.[9]

This paints the whole of The Unit in a new light and draws out the fact that the novel voices a criticism of the whole edifice of contemporary spiritual/therapeutic culture, most visible in the New Age movement, which often calls for a reversal of disenchantment and the creation of a ‘reenchanted’ world (and here Thomas Moore’s best-selling book The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life is but one example).  Viewing it from the angle set out by Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit, what is going on in the development of the whole therapeutic ethos is in reality very different.  In important ways that go largely unspoken, the world of universal individual achievement, the world where we can go to a yoga class or purchase ancient Mayan herbs to mediate the effects of a stressful life, is a world not unlike that of the Unit, and we, as its residents, are not unlike the human capital that is corralled there to serve a purpose and then to be discarded when our usefulness is finished.  All of this raises a series or vital, necessary question: Is therapy really just another management technique and, worse, one that many people gladly submit themselves to?  Are we concerned with all of this healing and wholeness because it allows us to more effective employees, voters, and consumers?  Is all of this a symptom of the commodification of the human subject?  Is the New Age, rather than a new era of freedom and respect for the individual, in reality an ideal embodiment of disenchantment and a pathway to an even more dysenchanted world?

Sheer pointlessness is a deeply subversive affair.

Terry Eagleton, After Theory


Brief excursus on rationalisation and the contemporary university: That this poverty of utility has permeated the contemporary academy to an unprecedented degree goes perhaps without saying.  That the value of university research and teaching is now primarily filtered though economic concerns is immediately obvious to anyone working within the Performance Based Research Funding (PBRF) system in New Zealand, a system which imposes an inappropriate and ultimately harmful standard of ‘excellence’ and ‘performance’ drawn from the business world and situated within a narrowly-prescribed system of valuation.  Education is not a product, nor is it a service and to treat it as such has serious detrimental consequences, such as the need to court and treat students as customers.  On the reverse side of the coin, we find significant numbers of students who are unwilling or simply unable to make the intellectual leap to find the value in studying something that will not help them find a job or in studying for a purpose other than gathering marks towards a degree.  The great tragedy here when thinking about the value of the study of religion, or any of the Humanities for that matter, is that, in spending time and energy attempting to prove their worth in the narrow strictures of utilitarian and economic value, scholars are distracted from doing work that is truly valuable (Mark Bauerlein has an excellent piece on this in the Chronicle of Higher Education).  Perhaps all of this ultimately breaks down to a question of belief; either one believes that the pursuit of knowledge is valuable in its own right, or one does not.  This may be one of those things about which one must square one’s shoulders and declare, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other’.

As the Unit’s librarian Kjell tells Dorrit early on in her stay, ‘there are so many intellectuals here.  People who read books … People who read books tend to be dispensable.  Extremely’.[10] That the Unit is also home to a number of artists and writers should perhaps come as no surprise, for the arts, like the pursuit of knowledge, are formally – and often economically – useless.  That these things make life worth living is, of course, of no consequence.


[1] Ninni Holmqvist, The Unit, translated by Marlaine Delargy (New York: Other Press, 2006), 52.

[2] Holmqvist, Unit, 93.

[3] See Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 35-42 and 90.

[4] Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 2, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 15. Emphasis in original.

[5] Bataille, Accursed II, 197.

[6] Bataille, Accursed II, 42.

[7] Holmqvist, Unit, 136.

[8] Holmqvist, Unit, 103.

[9] Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, edited by Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), 28.

[10] Holmqvist, Unit, 48.

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  • Forbidden Gospels (April DeConick)
  • Genealogy of Religion (Cris)
  • Joseph Gelfer
  • Otagosh (Gavin Rumney)
  • PaleoJudaica (Jim Davila)
  • Religion and the Media (University of Sheffield)
  • Religion Bulletin
  • Religion Dispatches
  • Remnant of Giants
  • Sects and Violence in the Ancient World (Steve A. Wiggins)
  • Sheffield Biblical Studies (James Crossley)
  • Stalin's Moustache (Roland Boer)
  • The Immanent Frame
  • The New Oxonian (R. Joseph Hoffmann)
  • Theofantastique

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