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Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

A World War, centered on consciousness itself. "The fusion of agentic AI and LLMs marks a new frontier in information warfare ... reach[ing] unprecedented scale and precision, manipulating beliefs and behaviors on a population-wide level." - AAAS 'Science' journal, 01/22/26 x.com/nick_routled...

Full alt-text available here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTjElB7N4CjztlEbTaDiUPB8HuL3oy9cQVWkbRD7f9KSstIp-7phgH3RlK7cL0hdhpClphwYvr3Z5f-/pub

January 23, 2026 at 2:05 PM

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

MLK’s letter reads less like warning than autopsy. Let's be honest: precisely as the world polycrisis demands love, truth and solidarity, Abrahamic religion, by and large, reads captured and spent—credible only to its own tribes and even there, imploding. A migration is due.
x.com/nick_routled...

January 19, 2026 at 5:26 PM

Reposted by Nick Routledge

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

1/5 Coming from a view where history includes mutations in meaning-making—changes in the OS of how humans perceive and value—Mitchell's right on. Also, as mediation itself collapses (institutional, platform, epistemic) and trust with it, place and immediacy become the only reliable unit of reality.

January 15, 2026 at 4:57 PM

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

The terror and the good news. A hangover from my days co-chairing the National Computer Ethics and Responsibilities Campaign, and ongoing citizen-led peace-work, but I've spent months wading through a raft of reports on the nuclear weaponization of AI.
threadreaderapp.com/thread/20085...

Thread by @nick_routledge on Thread Reader App

@nick_routledge: @NoemaMag @AndrewSorota 1/32 That's exceptional. And an urgent, parallel concern? A hangover from my days co-chairing the National Computer Ethics and Responsibilities Campaign, and o...

threadreaderapp.com

January 7, 2026 at 6:06 PM

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

@nilsgilman.bsky.social Pete Hegseth Orders Top Military Leaders to Attend Mystery Meeting
theintercept.com/2025/09/25/h...

Pete Hegseth Orders Top Military Leaders to Attend Mystery Meeting

“To say the military leadership is anxious would be an understatement,” one defense official told The Intercept.

theintercept.com

September 25, 2025 at 5:01 PM

Reposted by Nick Routledge

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

Whatever lens we use, the Parousia/radical philosophical event/Shift/Great Reset/etc. signals the breaking of a spell vastly more determinative than the epistemic frameworks maintaining the momentum of contingent social and political association: the cult of modernity itself. x.com/nick_routled...

Copy of tweet and quote tweet here:

https://x.com/nick_routledge/status/1707162423252439348

|end/ The psych's archetypal, and its direction harrowingly predictable. And half-assed, any effort to address this escalating mimetic, global pattern of self-justifying violence amped up to the nation-state level, without factoring in conclusive intervention at a planetary scale.

@nick_routledge
Apr 10, 2023
Replying to @MassimoFaggioli
Cultures differ, but the bastard appeal of a Political Savior remains strikingly universal. The Con? Gone global. Modi, but the South Asian face of a spell of False Deliverers offering up gathering points for national anguish. What nature, then, an effective, planetary response?

Image of tweet:

Nils Gilman @nils_gilman “A grim warning that the spell cast by the demagogues of our times is profound: It is based on fear and loathing of internal and external enemies, and secured by close personal identification with and deep psychological dependence on charismatic figures.” https://bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-20/narendra-modi-owns-india-s-covid-19-disaster…

September 9, 2025 at 9:41 PM

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

Trends? According to the July 2025 Producer Price Index (PPI) data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) the price of vegetables rose by 38.9% in July. www.bls.gov/news.release...

Producer Price Index News Release summary - 2025 M07 Results

www.bls.gov

August 14, 2025 at 4:38 PM

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

🧵1/10 Grounded hope isn’t a tweet. It’s trees that feed, flowers that heal, grasses that hold soil; all types of folk, the world over, together rooting #NewWorldCreation in a future where people and planet thrive as one. #EcoAwakening #PlanetaryPentecost
x.com/nick_routled...

Nick Routledge on X: "@Plough And what is it to make love with Belonging itself? Borges: "Un hombre que cultiva su jardín, como quería Voltaire...Esas personas, que se ignoran, están salvando el mundo."" / X

@Plough And what is it to make love with Belonging itself? Borges

x.com

May 20, 2025 at 2:07 PM

Reposted by Nick Routledge

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

A cartoon caricature functionally enculturating as mass consciousness was predictable, I suppose, given how secular modernity so thoroughly constitutes a P$eudo-Event. The question remains, however. Is there a 'more real' Reality to hand and, crucially, how may we access it? x.com/nick_routled...

Copy of tweet here:

https://x.com/nick_routledge/status/1567181174849830914

@nick_routledge
Worldly, I arrived Stateside 36 yrs. ago, to a distinct impression that represented reality was superseding direct experience as a/the paramount, defining influence shaping the way peeps related. Already, folks' sense of the Real, of significance itself, seemed strangely 'owned'.

Second tweet here:

https://x.com/nick_routledge/status/1831739547199402185

@nick_routledge
Sep 5
Replying to
@NealSpackman
and
@silvopasturist
Yup, we walk among zombies. Then again, if inhabiting the Real comes fully within reach (only) in assent to the truth of the neighborly, there's nothing finer to claim each one of us than awakening to a fully personalized, home-field advantage. Home is where we live, after all.

April 14, 2025 at 5:10 PM

Reposted by Nick Routledge

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

With great effects coming of "the least” of beginnings. The yeast of the butterfly effect of the Spirit, the Word within the enspirited word voiced as a form of enraptured articulation, unleashing the grace of a tipping point toward extraordinary transition. Spiritual uprising. x.com/nick_routled...

Copy of tweet thread here:

https://x.com/nick_routledge/status/1600499024054087681

@nick_routledge
Dec 7, 2022
On restoring the correspondence between God and word? In one of his last letters from prison, before the the Nazis murdered him, Bonhoeffer wrote, “The day will come when men will once more be called so to utter the word of God that the world will be changed and renewed by it...”

@nick_routledge
“... It will be a new language, perhaps quite non-religious, but liberating and redeeming as was Jesus’ language; it will shock people and yet overcome them by its power.” 2 Thessalonians 2:8. James Hillman: "Words, like angels, are powers."

April 25, 2025 at 3:55 PM

Reposted by Nick Routledge

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

"The path we’re on now is the path of least resistance: a slow slide into deepening digital dependency, where we continue to cede control of our attention and our autonomy to the Simulation and the mysterious algorithms that power it." World War III, exactly as McLuhan saw it. x.com/nick_routled...

@nick_routledge
Pete Berkman: "When the environment is invisible, the path of least resistance is determined by the medium itself. Our plans plan us. In order torecover human agency over technique, the invisible environment has to be made visible. “Apocalypse,” McLuhan says, “is our salvation.”

@nick_routledge
1/2 So obvious we cannot see it. Our media, McLuhan noted, 'own' us in
strangely concealed, "invincibly persuasive" ways. As such, ‘apocalypse’ (in its original sense of 'unveiling') makes the visible Real, freeing us from an all-enveloping enchantment. And the Cloud's role here?

@nick_routledge
McLuhan saw it as crucial to push past an experiential ‘environment’
invisibly dictating the limits of our questions, positing technology and
consciousness merging, in effect, in a Cloud-enabled apocalypse transcending such limits to birth 'a new form of revelation’ (Panikkar).

@nick_routledge
“It is, therefore, a simple maxim of communication study that any change in the means of communication will produce a chain of revolutionary consequences at every level of culture and politics.” ~ Marshall McLuhan, ‘A Historical Approach to the Media’ (1955)

April 30, 2025 at 3:33 AM

Reposted by Nick Routledge

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

Epistemic, such refusal to confront reality and, concomitantly, a trivializing 'depthlessness' (Jameson) 'allergic to meaning' (Eagleton) incapable of recognizing, never mind enacting, a coherent response to our polycrisis. So, we rise as 'a new form of revelation.' (Panikkar) x.com/nick_routled...

Copy of tweet, image and quote tweet here:
https://x.com/nick_routledge/status/1756117395218088319

May 17, 2025 at 12:45 PM

Reposted by Nick Routledge

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

Concomitantly, this vastly-accelerated, planetary unraveling correlates with complementary mimetic trends subverting the geopolitical psycho-dynamics historically putting a brake on Armageddon. We desperately need an immediate, radical revisioning of the problem of war. x.com/nick_routled...

Copy of tweet here:

https://x.com/nick_routledge/status/1555757247396868096

@nickroutledge
#HiroshimaDay2022 The US nuclear stockpile currently comprises some 3,700 deployed bombs/warheads, equivalent to about 58,039 Hiroshima-sized bombs. Explode one of those bombs per minute and it would take 40.3 days to use them all.

@nils_gilman
Nuclear weapons remain the greatest threat, by far, to long term human well being and civilizational integrity

@thewritertype
There's plenty to be despondent about this #HiroshimaDay, but given the grotesque assortment of festering despots, lethal clowns, and howling nut jobs currently in power all over the world, we're fucking lucky any of us are still here at all.

Noam Chomsky Quotes
It's hard to contest the conclusion of the last commander of the Strategic Air Command, Gen . Lee Butler, that humanity has so far survived the nuclear age “by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.”

May 17, 2025 at 1:35 PM

Reposted by Nick Routledge

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

It's DRAFT INSTANT, y'all!!
~ Image: Raimon Panikkar, Opera Omnia (Vol. 1) - The Christian Language x.com/nick_routled...

3. The experience of resurrection takes away the fear of death, and this is perhaps its most visible aspect, since the fear of death cannot be overcome through willpower alone. However, it is also something more than just Platonic immortality. I know I am mortal, and I am not comforted by the knowledge that I have an immortal soul if I am going to be separated from it at a future point. Neither am I satisfied with believing I shall rise again after death or perhaps in some final moment that I shall not be able to experience. The experience of resurrection is here and now—in tempiternity. Those who are risen live the novelty of life in every instant. They do not get bored or anxious about time passing. Is this not the work of the Spirit that "makes all things new"? Resurrection is an act that is in constant renewal. If we die every day, as the apostle says, we rise again in every moment. The experience of continuous creation, and even more so of continuous Incarnation, brings with it that of resurrection in every instant.

April 24, 2025 at 4:13 PM

Reposted by Nick Routledge

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

So, how and where is this vast, interlocking array of trans-cultural, trans-national structures of religious and secular consciousness and power militantly vested in a symbiotic, aggregate, existential imperative to eclipse the sunburst of the world messianic, countered? x.com/nick_routled...

Copy of tweets here:

https://x.com/nick_routledge/status/1848013005839360299

@nick_routledge
Aug 20, 2022
Replying to
@nick_routledge
@jesuits_ireland
and
@Pontifex
4/ Our present modernity can be characterized by its endless deferral of judgment, “a secularized parody of the Church’s incessant deferral of the last judgment” (Agamben), an institution that can only preserve its own existence by endlessly postponing the judgment it announces.

And here:

https://x.com/nick_routledge/status/1904908968277008875

@nick_routledge1
Mar 26
Replying to
@epaphfras
The Second Advent, then, as a _planetary_ pedagogical method equal to the gospel transmission of a radical transformation in the meaning of power in the unitive core of the human being, whereby all the heart’s quests are revalued and hierarchies of history reversed.

April 14, 2025 at 3:35 PM

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

#JianweXun: "What's at stake isn't just our political systems but our capacity for sovereignty over our own perception. The real battle isn't between different ideologies but between different architectures of consciousness." www.stultiferanavis.it/la-rivista/i...

IPNOCRAZIA: intervista al suo (pseudo)autore, Janwei Xun

Una intervista di 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐨 𝐌𝐚𝐳𝐳𝐮𝐜𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐢, co-fondatore di STULTIFERANAVIS con l'autore di Ipnocrazia - Trump, Musk e la nuova architettura della realtà, Jianwei Xun. --- Interview of Carlo Mazzucchelli w...

www.stultiferanavis.it

April 14, 2025 at 4:09 PM

Reposted by Nick Routledge

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

A 2007 anthology, 'The Politics to Come', offers a lucid appraisal of political possibilities transcending exhausted, shopworn symbioses of secular and religious imaginaries and containment: the Iranian political scientist, Ali Shari’ati, adds mightily to the advance, too.
x.com/nick_routled...

To be sure, modernity famously expels Judaeo-Christian messianism to the margins of thought – by variously labeling it dogma, superstition, fanaticism, false consciousness or ressentiment – but it does so precisely by taking as its own the political and temporal dynamism of eschatology... Yet, at the same time, it is possible to detect what, with apologies to Kant, we might call a newly arisen ‘messianic tone’ within contemporary thought. For Jacques Derrida, to take only the most prominent recent example, it is clear that the messianic represents the last – and perhaps even the best – means of keeping open a relation to an absolute, unforeseeable future in the face of every political, theological or economic attempt to foreclose upon that future: what he calls a ‘messianism without messianism’ becomes the best way of articulating ‘the “yes” to the arrivante(e), the “come” to the future that cannot be anticipated.

What does it mean, then, to speak of ‘a Politics to Come’ today? Where does it come from? And why has it emerged now? Is it – to be crude – a step backwards into premodern theological dogma? Is it – equally crudely – the final nail in the coffin of an exhausted Enlightenment utopianism or communism? Or could this wary messianism – which despite every attempt to assimilate it still remains somehow stubbornly irreducible to the sovereign order of neo-liberal modernity – perhaps represent a way of thinking the theologico-political condition of modernity otherwise? Why has the possibility of a messianic Politics to Come reasserted itself now? Is it a ‘turn’ or a ‘return’? Is it a monstrous anachronism, postmodern kitsch or the logical outworking of modernity’s own theological origins? To what extent might it be the basis of a new political theology – or the sign of an irreducible theological remainder within the political?

The Politics to Come: Power, Modernity and the Messianic,
- Arthur Bradley and Paul Fletcher, Editors.

INTRODUCTION: SAVING HOPE, THE WAGER OF MESSIANISM
Anna Glazava and Paul North

1. Some well-known recent books that announce or promote an end to secularity and a “return” to or of religion in society in general, and in the human and social sciences in particular, are Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard, 2007); Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity (Stanford, 2003); and Luc Ferry, Man Made God: The Meaning of Life (University of Chicago, 2002). A sampling of critical analyses of the processes and idea of secularization include: Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (University of Chicago, 2008); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, 2003 Marcel Gauchet, Tbe Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (Princeton University Press, 1097). Works by Jean-Luc Marion fall by and large into a border-zone between theology proper and phenomenological revisions of theological categories. To the latter class belong Visible et le révélé (Cerf, 2005), De surcroit: études sur les phénoménes saturés (Presses universitaires; de France, 2001), and Etant donné: Essai d'une phénoménologic de la donation (Presses universitaires de France, 1997). These have been translated as Visiible and the Revealed (Fordham, 2008), Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (Stanford, 2002), and In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena (Fordham, 2004). Two books may be considered the mothers of all critiques of secularity: Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (1921; University of Chicago, 2006), and Karl Lovwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (University of Chicago, 1949).

2. Uncovering motifs, concepts, images, and motivations traditionally associated with religion or theology persisting in purportedly secular thought has a rather long tradition. Marx's critique of Feuerbach is one of the earliest in post-Kantian thought, Heidegger's critique of ontotheology one of the most far-reaching. Resuscitation of the messianic theologou-menon in particular has a fairly limited genealogy. Epimessianic writing first fans out in the twentieth century. One strand revitalizes eschatological themes identified as Jewish and loosely responds to political Zionism: Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlisung (J. Kauffmann, 1921); Walter Benjamin, “Theological-Political Fragment” (probably 1922-23), Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Rowohlt, 1928), “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death” (1934), and “Historical-Philosophical Theses” (1940); Jacob ‘Taubes’s dissertation, Abendlindisches Eschatologie (A. Francke, 1947); certain fragments in Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschii- digten Leben (Suhrkamp, 1951); Gershom Scholem’s 1959 and now infamous and much-cited lecture “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism” (in The Messianic Idea in Judaism, Schocken, 1971). Transformations of the concept of “futurity” among thinkers identified as “Jewish” can be found in Pierre Bouretz's Witness for the Future: Philosophy and Messianism (Johns Hopkins, 2010). Another strand of epimessianic writing attempts to revitalize Paul of Tarsus as the savior of theory. Some texts in this genre that focus on or include messianism are Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (University of California, 1994); Alain Badiou, St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford, 2003); Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul (Stanford, 2004); Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford, 2005)...

…Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (Routledge, 1994) and “Marx & Sons,” published in translation in Ghostly Demarcations (Verso, 1999) do not fall directly along any of these strands.

3. Much of the analysis of the “turn” or “return” has been carried out by Hent de Vries, first and most directly in Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Johns Hopkins 1999), which was preceded by Theologie in Pianissimo, a study of theological figures in Adorno and Levinas (Peeters, 1989), translated into English as Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas (Johns Hopkins, 2005). De Vries’s study of the renewed theophilosophy, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Johns Hopkins, 2002), was published amid a stream of anthologies edited by him on the topic of the “return”: Post-Theism: Reframing the Judeo-Christian Tradition (Peeters, 2000, with Henri A. Krop and Arie L. Molendijk), Religion and Media (Stanford, 2001, with Samuel Weber), Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (Fordham, 2006, with Lawrence E. Sullivan), and Religion beyond a Concept (Fordham, 2008). Along this trajectory one notes a turn in de Vries’s focus. At first he seems to be responding to the reappraisals of philosophemes traditionally considered religious, but later he seems to be reevaluating religion itself. A good introduction to the “turn” in French philosophy is the collection Phenomenology and the Theological Turn (Fordham, 2000). In it there are important contributions by Dominique Janicaud, Jean- Francois Courtine, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Paul Ricouer.

March 19, 2025 at 10:39 AM

Reposted by Nick Routledge

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

What if a war on perception itself - so totalizing in its full-spectrum claim upon the nature of reality that we barely recognize this fundamentally epistemic assault for the peak deception it represents - is, oddly, similarly vulnerable to a larger, 'invisible' susceptibility.
x.com/nick_routled...

Sadly, I think we need to see ourselves as already fighting a war: This is a new kind of war — a total war. It is not simply a military operation involving guns and tanks. This is, first and foremost, a consciousness war — a war fought inside our minds — that has a military dimension as one of its theaters of operation. I would say it is a total war because it is an Orwellian war that ultimately seeks to reshape subjectivity itself into abject compliance.

Right now we are fighting a kind of total war for the future of humanity. But the vast majority of people in the West don’t seem to realize this yet. They are still floating along, sleepwalking, unaware. They continue to focus on trivialities while the war to define our future is being waged both in public (within the US government, Ukraine, and Israel at the moment) and behind the scenes (through social media algorithms, manipulated news, and weaponized AI). It is being waged through transformations of language, elisions of words, deletion of websites.

- @DanielPinchbeck, March 15, substack

March 17, 2025 at 1:49 PM

Reposted by Nick Routledge

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

Character and essence?

March 13, 2025 at 2:32 PM

Reposted by Nick Routledge

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

1/5 They're hardly alone. 'The Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth' construct is a universal, religious trope. Hence, the vacant transcendence of 'Rapture' fantasies and, more significantly perhaps, a commonplace, quotidian abrogation of what it takes to be fully and fundamentally human.

March 12, 2025 at 1:54 AM

Reposted by Nick Routledge

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

1/ Not too sure where N.T. Wright and my notes begin and end but this is very largely him: "This is what Paul means when he writes of suffering 'with Christ' Rom. 8:17... There is the concept of 'messianic woes', that the world is to be divided into two ages, the present 'evil age'(Gal. 1:4) and...

March 8, 2025 at 2:10 PM

Reposted by Nick Routledge

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

It begins, of course, with 2 Cor. 10:5 but finds fulfillment only in the “costly grace” of Bonhoeffer which requires action, “for faith is only real when there is obedience, never without it, and faith only becomes faith in the act of obedience.” First, hear the Kingdom aright. x.com/nick_routled...

Copy of tweet here:

https://x.com/nick_routledge/status/1843351054479700455

@nick_routledge
·
Oct 7, 2024
Replying to
@Plough
"...the commandment to hear aright...must be first fulfilled in order that we may then become obedient to it. The word of Jesus places one in decision, the decision of hearing aright, [whereby] one “does” the word, or of hearing falsely, in which case one “does not do” the word."

1/7 The hermaneutic, deeply vexing, though, isn't it? How on earth do we sensibly communicate an experience of the staggering meaningfulness and plenitude of a Depth Realm conceived and experienced only through an obedience to love turning the world upside down? (Acts 17:6)

@nick_routledge
We only have the first fruits of the Kingdom in this world, but we experience enough to know that it’s the only thing that will ever satisfy us. Once we have had the truth, half-truths do not satisfy us anymore. In its light, everything else is relative, even our own life. -Rohr

@nick_routledge
Jun 2, 2024
Ragaz: "Not only does Jesus not bring a new religion, he does not bring any religion at all. One can't make this fact clear enough. He does not want a new religion, but rather a kingdom, a new creation, a new world." Thus, "We must teach spiritual things spiritually," 1 Cor. 2:13

@nick_routledge
Feb 5
Replying to @nick_routledge and @Dan_Bowdoin
end/ Panikkar: "The ultimate religious fact does not lie in the realm of doctrine or even individual self-consciousness... subordinating reality to mind. The ultimate basis for the method will have to be the very reality which the method helps to disclose." (Lk. 17:20-21)

March 8, 2025 at 1:57 PM

Reposted by Nick Routledge

Nick Routledge

@nickroutledge.bsky.social

FBI Directors Freeh and Comey both emphasized the significance of FBI trainees visiting the DC Holocaust Museum. And now? The base, patently nationalist hypocrisy of 'genocide remembrance agendas' of late surely lands as one of the more confounding examples of systemic moral collapse in our midst.

February 24, 2025 at 9:10 PM

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