Category: Blog

AI hype and reality is confusing, but also an opportunity “For a tear is an intellectual thing.” William Blake To read the headlines, you would think that intelligence is about processing information, solving problems and collecting data. But it’s not. Real intelligence is about understanding, richness and the shining beauty of life; there should be… Continue reading The Campaign For Real Intelligence

Many people report apparitions of their loved ones after death, and even of loved dogs and cats. But how do these after-death communications align with the Christian teaching of the resurrection of the body? In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon explore the evidence for the post-mortem appearances of humans and non-humans,… Continue reading Making Sense of the Resurrection of the Body. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake & Mark Vernon

Psychedelics dominate vegetal spirituality. But there is another herbaceous tradition Devotion to shrooms, communion through imbibing, enthusiastic psychonauts preach. But I can report on an alternative spiritual intimacy with plants, thanks to a wonderful talk, based on her book, by the scholar-practitioner, Simone Kotva. We were speaking at a symposium in Oslo, entitled Being Human… Continue reading Trust Your Inner Plant, As The Mystics Say

This is the script for my Thought For The Day delivered on BBC Radio 4. The strike by resident doctors highlights the severe tensions faced by the National Health Service. The tragedy of the dispute, and any disruption experienced by patients, is that all sides involved no doubt very much want health services to improve.… Continue reading What exactly is health?

  Apollo astronauts suffered much after their return to Earth. Will those on Artemis? My third year undergraduate physics project was to measure the heights of mountains on the Moon. I didn’t get to go to the Moon, but, instead, had to take the best photographs I could through the university telescopes and calculate the… Continue reading Splashdown. Now Comes The Greatest Danger

Ancient Egypt is much associated with the origins of western perceptions of God. In the Corpus Hermeticum, the Black Land is called a “temple of the cosmos” and a “consecrated statue”. The orientation of the Nile from North to South, highlighting the passage of the Sun from East to West, so wonderfully manifests the principle:… Continue reading As Above, So Below. Christian Hermeticism, Easter mysteries and enjoying the inside of the whole world

The play of the medieval infinite scroll evoked divine presence. Might it do so again? Human beings had lived with, and loved, the infinite scroll long before the electronic version was rolled out a couple of decades back. The earlier type took the form of illuminated manuscripts and Books of Hours. These colourful parchments captivated… Continue reading Is There A There There? Testing Re-enchantment

Various types of bombardment are a feature of war. The worst kind is, of course, being directly in the line of fire, unprepared and innocent. “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty… Continue reading “I will not cease from Mental Fight” Widening the war in the time of mercurial Trump

Dante Alighieri died in September 1321 and it seemed that his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, was incomplete, his first biographer, Boccaccio, relates. The Renaissance humanist’s Life of Dante reports that, at the time of Dante’s passing, the final, culminating thirteen cantos of the Paradisowere missing, presumed unfinished. But then, a full eight months after his… Continue reading Transhumanising! Dante in a Technological Age

In the UK at least, there is, right now, really only one piece of news doing the rounds, which is the arrest of the former Prince Andrew, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. It set me thinking about why this is such momentous news.   In a way, that’s obvious. The fallout from the Epstein files has been building… Continue reading Privileged persons in the modern age. A thought on a momentous arrest