What’s in store for 2023

While my country is being invaded (to name no other enormity about to befall us) I will, God willing, finish my manuscript on Otis Q. Sellers, about whom I’ve blogged (and drafted a lot apart from this platform) over the past few years.

One challenge I’ve faced is how to represent myself. I’m not a professor of Hebrew or Greek or of the Bible, but then I wasn’t a professor of American Communism when I compiled the chapters of Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness; or of political economy when I blogged Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic into existence; or of philosophy (which I did study formally at the graduate level) before writing the posts that became Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him. Nevertheless, I’m proud of their contents and stand by them.

Reflecting on these books, I see that each expressed a polemical impulse to set a record straight, not to bolster a curriculum vitae. Were I to write my Sellers book to, say, impress a church historian or scripture scholar, I would doom it to failure. I also don’t think I could muster the interest to see it through.

If, however, I were to order my historical and biographical material to tell the story of my Christian Individualism (the new working title for Maverick Workman) as it found fulfillment in Sellers’s, I believe the book can resonate with fellow Christian truth-seekers. (If they manage to stumble upon it.)

While that’s going on in the background, I’ll be giving expression to other interests, especially Marxism, with which I had more than a nodding acquaintance a half-century ago, an ideological cancer that’s metastasizing throughout the body of Western culture (or what remains of it). It continues to scramble people’s minds, and it’s about time I say what I have to about it.

My reference point will be the life and work of a remarkable autodidact, the Trinidad-born Trotskyist theoretician, pan-Africanist activist, historian, translator, novelist, playwright, athlete and sports journalist, and orator (have I left anything out?) Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901-1989).

In the previous post I uploaded and illustrated the text of my Amazon review of the new James bio. On Amazon, please consider voting the review “helpful” (if you found it to be).

Evaluating James’s philosophy will give me an opportunity to test my grasp of the thought of Eric Voegelin (1901-1985), whom I met in 1983 (the annus mirabilis during which Bernard Lonergan, Murray Rothbard, and James Sadowsky first graced my path). Voegelin held that modernism expressed a spiritual malady of which Marxism was but one expression. He called the disease gnosticism, and I’m curious to see whether that characterization captures the key to understanding James. Four years ago I memorialized my meeting in “Eric Voegelin: no debate without accord on existential order.” Please consider taking a look at it.

For those fascinated by synchronicity: all three gents were born in the first year of the last century, Voegelin the day after James.

In 1901 the University of Cologne (Köln), Voegelin’s hometown, was founded; born just before Queen Victoria died, James was for those 18 days a Victorian colonial (he later mastered that age’s literary legacy); Sellers was an infant when William McKinley, 25th U.S. President (the last to fight in the Civil War), was assassinated.

Given any year of that century, their ages are easily calculable, and I try to ascertain where each of them was that year. In 1932, for instance, the year they turned 31,  Voegelin got married, James left Trinidad for London, and Sellers left churchianity for once and for all.

Well, those are my plans. I hope my telling them moves God to laugh and then inaugurate His manifest Kingdom on earth, thereby rendering further writing of mine unnecessary (if it’s not already so).

Merry Christmas to all!