nevermind the bricolage

theology+culture

Spring term began this week and I am teaching a core class on Theology and Culture. Those are broad topics to gapple with in ten weeks, so I have tried to break things into some manageable pieces. Ten weeks, ten topics--macro topics such as the state of the world and theology to micro issues like media, body, design etc. I have also created a little bit of a starting point by highlighting a few key issues that we have to face as we tackle these issues. At first i was going to use 'post' but in the end I am just using 'after'--so after-darwin/freud/einstein are some of the central 'afters' we have to consider when thinking about what is happening in the cultural imagination. Stuff like that, we'll see how it works out but at least it brings up some key consierations and hopefully contributes to the deepening of the conversation.

Unkle Skull

In honour of the forthcoming Unkle release Only The Lonely, which features a track with vocals by the suited and booted Mr. Nick Cave

Money And Run (feat. Nick Cave) by UNKLE  

Lenten Journey

 

We are moving through the five senses and connecting them to spiritual life. From Diane Ackerman's marvellous book, A Natural History of the Senses, these words about the 'painter's eye,'

In his later years, Cezanne suffered a famous paroxysm of doubt about his genius. Could his art have been only an eccentricity of his vision, not imagination and talent guarded by a vigilant esthetic? In his excellent essay on Cezanne in Sense and Nonsense, Maurice Merleau-Ponty says: "As he grew old, he wondered whether the novelty of his painting might not come from trouble with his eyes, whether his whole life had not been based upon an accident of the body." Cezanne anxiously considered each brush stroke, striving for the fullest sense of the world, as Merleau-Ponty describes so well:

We see the depth, the smoothness, the softness, the hardness of objects; Cezanne even claimed that we see their odor. If the painter is to express the world, the arrangement of his colors must carry with it this invisible whole, or else his picture will only hint at things and will not give them in the imperious unity, the presence, the insurpassable plenitude which is for us the definition of the real. That is why each brush stroke must satisfy an infinite number of conditions. Cezanne sometimes pondered for hours at a time before putting down a certain stroke, for, as Bernard said, each stroke must "contain the air, the light, the object, the composition, the character, the outline, and the style." Expressing what exists is an endless task.

Opening up wide to the fullness of life, Cezanne felt himself to be the conduit where nature and humanity met -- "The landscape thinks itself in me ... I am its consciousness" -- and would work on all the different sections of a painting at the same time, as if in that way he could capture the many angles, half-truths, and reflections a scene held, and fuse them into one conglomerate version. "He considered himself powerless," Merleau-Ponty writes, "because he was not omnipotent, because he was not God and wanted nevertheless to portray the world, to change it completely into a spectacle, to make visible, how the world touches us." When one thinks of the masses of color and shape in his paintings, perhaps it won't come as a surprise to learn that Cezanne was myopic, although he refused glasses, reputedly crying "Take those vulgar things away!" He also suffered from diabetes, which may have resulted in some retinal damage, and in time he developed cataracts (a clouding of the clear lens). Huysmans once captiously described him as '"An artist with a diseased retina, who, exasperated by a defective vision, discovered the basis of a new art." Born into a different universe than most people, Cezanne painted the world his slightly askew eyes saw, but the random chance of that possibility gnawed at him.

Jesus Porn

 
I just spent a few days in Texas, Waco actually, hanging out with Adam Moore and the rest of Void Collective. I had a great time, made some new friends and got an awful lot of Bible Belt Christianity--billboards everywhere proclaiming one thing or another. There were so many images I wanted to capture, but I would never have got anywhere but I did get a couple of snaps which are worth a little comment. I found the 'porn' billboard slightly homo-erotic--did it occur to whomever put the thing together that a virtually naked Jesus seems slightly incongrous with the larger intent of the billboard? The whole thing just seems wrong to me. Almost as wrong as the new burger joint we drove by--I'm not sure it will eclipse In-N-Out, guess it depends on whether thickness is your thing or not-haha!!!

Cowboy skulls

Well, I'm in Texas so it seemed right!

The Universal Sigh

Radiohead are releasing a newspaper to coincide with the physical release of King of Limbs. They are going to be handed out free until they run out. I wonder what the content of a Radiohead newspaper will be? Nothing to do with the environment, or technology or ennui I imagine!! Check out the site setup by the band and discover where you can pick up your copy on Tuesday.

Consciousness

Last night, as the deluge fell upon Los Angeles, I drove to Westchester to particiapte in a Wednesday evening gatheinrg at a friend's church. Holy Nativity Westchester is a pretty unique place. They have a yoga studio, a buddhist/christian meditation centre and a community garden instead of traditional landscaping, to name just a few of the exceptional things they get up to. They gave up carbon for Lent--encouraging congregants to bike, fast from TV and lights, and have organized a series of mid-week interfaith conversations around the relation between music and prayer. Next week they have a Buddhist dj, last night they got me. It was quite fun. I dont have too much to say about prayer, well,I didnt think I did. I told a story arc about my love of music and how my view of prayer has changed these days from a very unsaitsfying attempt to get things happening to my more recent posture and belief that prayer is seeing things differently, a shift in consciousness. I talked about transitions from praying with eyes closed to living with eyes open--opposite ends of a spectrum perhaps. To be honest, I really don't pray in the classic interventionist way, I have no faith in that at all. For me, as I said, prayer is simply a way of living. I think it was Richard Rohr who said that prayer is not one of ten thousand things it is the one things that helps us to see ten thousand things, something like that. Anyway, it was a sweet night--organic soup and bread, some nice conversation and a starry, post-rain sky to drive home by.

Desk Skulls

Some of the skulls littering (very carefully placed actually) my desk, surrounding my solar-powered, waving QEII.

New Moment. 2

"The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture because it seeks to turn other ideas--uncertainty, progress, change--into crimes."

On the heels of my recent post about Paul, orthodoxy and a host of other things, I forgot to add this quote from Salman Rushdie. Rushdie is no fan of religion, not surprising given his encounter with it on the heels of his book The Satanic Verses, so his comment is loaded with a certain bias I am sure. Nonetheless, I find his words to contain at least a grain of truth. Conserving the past seems to be a primary move among the religions, if not every move toward the sacred, and while, of course, there is something to be said for maintaining continuity and connecting with tradition, the danger is that the sacred move becomes ever backward-looking and preservation minded. I say danger, and I chose that word carefully.

It is dangerous to make religion principally about the past, about what happened, and making any forward move difficult, if not downright impossible at times. Those who view conservation as preservation of a particular view of things(and of course, lets not forget that we all read our own biases back into everything anyway).

Of course, another component in this is that it depends on what one's view of the sacred is. I think it it is entirely possible to have an expansive view of the sacred that allows for the very things Rushdie names, there is no reason for ideas of progress, change or uncertainty to be excluded from a view of life as sacred, or even to explore that within a faith tradition. Possible, not easy, but it can be done.

(I ran out of steam on this post--maybe I'll come back to it and flesh things out a bit)

fashion Skull

I lost the information about this image--apologies.