Mark Vernon - Talks and Thoughts Mark Vernon

To read the essay, go to Aeon magazine's website, or https://aeon.co/essays/in-the-beginning-there-was-love-we-can-move-with-its-power

The everyday stuff called matter turns out to be both more fascinating and stranger than we usually assume. In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon ask just matter is, beginning with contemporary ideas from quantum physics, in which matter is frozen light, as the physicist David Bohm put it. 

They consider the relationship between matter and gravity, as well as matter and ancient notions of potentiality, which turn out to be surprising relevant today. 

The differences between quantity and quality offer another conversational thread, with the discussion also drawing in wider questions, such as the nature of matter within the philosophy of panpsychism, and also the etymological links between matter and mater, or mother, revealing factors about material of which most are unconscious today.

For more conversations between Rupert and Mark see
https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues
https://www.markvernon.com/talks

There is much talk of a revival of Christianity amongst secular intellectuals, at least in my cultural bubble. That may or may not be sociological significant and church attendence figures stay in marked decline. But what interests me is not so much the numbers as the spirit of the renewed interest. What is the feel of the Christianity being discussed, what attitudes does it embody, what spiritual does it represent?
CS Lewis and Owen Barfield discussed these things and, then, Barfield teased out differences between them after Lewis’s death. He characterised that as the difference between an analytic and romantic rationality, which produces separate even oppositional understandings of God, Jesus, salvation, this world, the imagination, the human and the creation as a whole.
I think that their “oppositional friendship” might illuminate our now, which I try to tease out in this talk.
Recorded in St Mary Magdalene church, Stapleford Park

0:00 The revival now and the differences between Lewis and Barfield
4:25 The Christian story as chasm or participation
8:08 Salvation or participation?
11:20 Exclusive Christianity or porous Christianity?
13:45 The role of reason and the imagination
17:11 Following the head or the heart?
21:21 Analytical and Romantic, allegorical and mythological approaches to truth
27:39 The appeal of Lewis, simplicity and joy
32:02 Polarities, oppositions and Trinitarian perception
35:40 Different experiences of time, culture wars and choice
39:02 What of the future of Christianity?

A couple of years back, Martin Shaw had a visionary experience that led him to Christianity. We talked about it as the Mossy face of Christ - https://youtu.be/8luN8bDDRBs?si=c7jHUt-Ih5xKlVWq

So it was great to talk again about what's been happening. Which is much. The conversation ranges over what might be happening now with Christianity, Martin's recent participation in the Symbolic World Summit, the strangeness, weirdness and terror of Christ, being in the world but not of it, and the importance of myths, stories and fairytales.

We mentioned Martin's new course The Skin-Boat and the Star as a practical manifestation of what has been happening for him. For more on that see here - https://schoolofmyth.com/five-weekend-programme/

For more on Mark's work see - https://www.markvernon.com

0:00 The reviving of interest in Christianity
2:53 Report from the Symbolic World Summit
6:53 Christ, fairytales and reconnecting with the source
14:21 How to keep Christianity strange
21:33 From ideas to encounter
24:11 Being in the world but not of the world
29:08 Passions of the soul and Rowan Williams
37:38 Knowing stories and inhabiting stories
43:48 From persona to presence
47:56 Good fruits not good works
49:26 Martin's new course and the imaginative edge
52:44 What puts people off Christianity?
54:01 Proxies for the Spirit
58:17 Limits and more, growth and depth
01:04:21 Romanticism coming of age
01:12:13 Jonathan Pageau, Malcolm Guite, Iain McGilchrist and others on the new course

The makers of Seaspiracy and Cowspiracy are back. Christspiracy is another profoundly disturbing film detailing the industrial abuse of our animal kin. Expect more horrific carelessness and exploitation on a mass scale. 

Only this time, Kip Andersen and Kameron Waters not only go global but look back in time. “This is plausibly the most significant new discovery about Jesus Christ, in the last 2,000 years,” says the blurb.

But can that be right? Has justified outrage at the treatment of our fellow creatures got the better of them? Initially, I wasn't convinced. But then Kameron Waters reached out to me and we had this long conversation.

See what you think. 

[Spoiler alert - we thoroughly discuss the Christian details in the film.]

For more on Christspiracy see https://www.christspiracy.com

For more on Mark, and his work on early Christianity and Jesus via the ideas of Owen Barfield, friend of CS Lewis, see http://www.markvernon.com/consciousness

00:00 Introduction
02:20 Where to see the documentary and how
04:33 The treatment of animals as a religious concern
12:26 The prehistory of hunting, sacrifice and temples
21:15 What did Jesus do when cleansing of the temple?
34:10 What was the cause of Jesus’s death?
44:38 Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus the vegetarian Nazarene?
58:37 Kameron’s own Christian journey
01:05:42 But did Jesus really not eat fish?
01:13:40 Ichthus, Pythagoreans and the 153 fish
01:24:00 What did Paul mean by vegetarians are weak?
01:31:05 Engaging with the film, engaging with the tradition

Energy is a key organising principle in modern science, the conversation of energy being a grounding and universal law. But what is energy? 
In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon examine the history of the idea and the word. In science, energy is a relatively recently notion, emerging in its current form in the 19th century, drawing much on mechanics. 
The word itself was coined by Aristotle, in the 4th century BCE, carrying a sense of vital actuality and living presence. That meaning is still remembered in Orthodox theology, which describes the energeia of God. 
The conversation ranges over the promiscuity of energy in the natural world to the spiritual notion of energy, including the subtle energies of the body. The implications of shaping the idea of energy through mechanical metaphors also has important ramifications, from the descriptions of economics and the efficacy of psychology to the experience of God. 
Further, the most recent physics argues that energy is not conserved after all as the universe expands.
For more conversations between Rupert and Mark see:
https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues
http://www.markvernon.com/talks