chief blogging officer

Yesterday I finally got the cables out and jump-started the Chief Blogging Officer site, which had been up on blocks for about a year. I started it in 2004 with sponsorship from Highbeam Research, and it contains much that is germane to present concerns here at Mystic B. All the old posts are still available, linked from the left column of the Legacy Archives page. So, if you've been tracking the convoluted evolution of my thinking here via newsreader (i.e., you didn't get the memo via the mailling list), you might want to pop over to CBO and have a look. Here's a sample from 9 May 2005... But wait. Didn't I start this with something about spiritualism? Yeah, I'm almost sure I did. Something about Swedenborg, I think,18th century wingnut and inventor of the Swedish meatball. His metaphysical cuisine was sampled by my old pal (not) Ralph Waldo Emerson, who also wrote him up in Representative Men as "The Mystic." Oooh! But this is important, however skeptical I may at first glance (and second, third, ... nth) appear. Because Emerson -- with that Oversoul baloney he picked up off Radio Free Upanishads via the Bhagavad Gita run through an early prototype of the Enigma machine -- was core to much weirdness that was to follow, including but not limited to the New Thought crowd I wrote about last Friday and... ta-da ...spiritualism. Natch. And I had planned to relate the brilliant insights of Spiritualism in Antebellum America to those of The Chautauqua Moment: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism, 1874-1920. As I said, there was a lot going on in the 19th century. And so on.