Critical Theory – Dustin J. Byrd, Ph.D.

On October 17th, I was fortunate to join colleagues, graduate students, and former and active professors from the Comparative Religion department at Western Michigan University to celebrate the retirement of the amazing scholar and master pedagogue, Dr. Brian C. Wilson. Dr. Wilson came to WMU in 1996 from UC-Santa Barbara, and quickly became an imminent scholar of local religious history. For thirty years he has educated WMU undergrads and graduate students in religion, religious history, religious theory, etc. I shared my work on the problem of “Geist” within the Willensgemeinschaft and Volksgemeinschaft states regarding Muslims, especially in post-secular Europe.

Dr. Brian Wilson has written some amazing books on American religious history, including Yankees in Michigan, John E. Fetzer and the Quest for the New Age, The California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and the Religion of Biologic Living. These books are all well worth reading as they give incredible insights to the religious history of this area of southern Michigan.

It was great to see my dear friends and mentors, Dr. Nancy Falk, Dr. Stephen Covell, Dr. Kevin Wanner, Dr. Amy DeRogatis of MSU, and many others, including my dear friend and former office mate, Sarah Montgomery-Richards.

On October 10, 2026, I had the opportunity to join other Erich Fromm scholars at the 2nd biennial Erich Fromm Society of North America conference held at Columbia University, New York. In my talk, I addressed the ways in which false consciousness is created by what Erich Fromm calls the “Magic Helper,” the person, ideology, movement, or group that the psychological precariat offload responsibility for their lives to. In times of great change, including economic and political chaos, those who suffer from what I have called “psychological precocity” – the abiding sense that one can or will “fall off the cliff” into an undesirable state of being – grows exponentially. In such times, people look for an authority outside of themselves that will magically resolve their conflicts, will slay the chaos, and restore them to their desired state of being. The conference was entitled, Erich Fromm and the Crisis of Democracy: Educational, Psychological, and Sociological Perspectives, and was organized by Rory Varrato, Ph.D., and Chiara Ginevra Berra, MPhil. I was joined in my panel by James E. Block, who spoke on “fashioning a democratic individual,” and Stephen Onley, who spoke on “the self-concealing crisis: automaton conformity and democratic legitimacy.” It was great to see my dear friend, Rainer Funk again, the greatest of scholars of Erich Fromm. He gave a wonderful talk on the last day entitled, “The Having Mode of Existence and Artificial Intelligence: Psychological Impact on Democracy.”

Here is the schedule of events from the conference: Erich Fromm Society of North America Conference 2026

The Political Theology Network published my short article, “Biophilic and Necrophilic Charisma,” on August 29, 2026. In this article I discuss Erich Fromm’s notions of “biophilia” – the “true love of life,” and “necrophilia” – the “true love of death” or all that is inanimate. I bring these two categories in conversation with Max Weber’s conception of “charisma,” in an attempt to distinguish between those in leadership positions who are essentially in service to life, meaningful existence, eudaemonia, and those who are in pursuit of that which is devoid of life: wealth, power, status, and destructiveness. Doing so, we arrive at the concepts of “biophilic charisma” and “necrophilic charisma,” which can be utilized as a means to interrogate the political, social, cultural, and economic leaders of today.

I would like to thank Maor Levitin for giving me the opportunity to write this short piece as well as the Political Theology Network for publishing it. It was a pleasure working with both.

To read the article, follow the link: Biophilic and Necrophilic Charisma.

Critical Perspectives, Vol. 2, no. 1, is now available. It features articles by Joseph Alayna & Krikor Ankeshian, Seyed Javad Miri, Ghasem Pourhasan & Zahra Haji Shahkaram, Mehdi Shariati, and me. There are also book reviews by Dmitry Shlapentokh and me. Critical Perspectives is the official journal of the Institute for Critical Social Theory, which I founded and co-direct with my colleague, Seyed Javad Miri. If you are interested in contributing to Critical Perspectives, send your article to me, the Editor-in-Chief.

Critical Perspectives is published by Ekpyrosis Press.

If you’d like to purchase a copy of the latest edition, it is available through Lulu: Critical Perspectives Vol. 2, no. 1.