nevermind the bricolage

theology after the death of self

Last night I did a podcast with my friends Bo and Tripp for their Homebrewed Christianity event with Reza Aslan--I was the 'opening act' if you will. We had a pretty wide-ranging discussion about what it means to be human in the 21st century and how that affects the ways in which we think about faith/belief etc. We talked a little about my own theological trajectory in the past few years which I outlined as taking in a couple of different factors. I think about theology chiefly after two significant 'events.' Theology after the 'death of god' and theology after the death of the self.

There is lots of talk about death of god theology these days. There have been a few less than friendly social-media exchanges over certain interpretations of that project, principally around radical theology and various interpretations of what that means. It highlights the problem with labels and naming things--the minute you do, someone usually takes issue with your particular interpretation of the contours, or appeals to some kind of assumed legitimate criteria for speaking about this or that, that one supposedly violates, misses or doesn't understand. I find most of it petty and not worth the effort of addressing, it is the kind of stuff that makes people walk away from institutions and groups of all kinds, but that's another conversation.

So I have been working through ideas around the post-metaphysical world and death of god theology, but I am also interested in the shifting world of the self and what that heralds for faith. I have never been that 'god-fixated' that may sound funny from someone who has spent more than thirty years in public dialogue about faith and religion, but god has always been a difficult issue for me, but it is only in the past few years that I have faced that fully and freed myself of other people's obligations for what constitutes faith (my rather general and dismissive dictum about this is that dogma is the noise of other peoples thinking and sometimes I have to tune it out). Where I have come to with some of this is captured in a perspective drawn from Altizer and others, that I cannot dismiss the present world for a transcendent one and that a continual reflection/obsession/focus on 'god,' particularly the metaphysical view of god, keeps lifting us out of this world, and I am interested in fully living in the present, in the here and now.

I have been living for a while with a few ideas drawn from here and there that I have been returning to over and over in an effort to harness and focus my own thinking on what all this means. Of particular importance has been a section of Bonhoeffer's letter about religionless christianity. I've written about this before so forgive repetition, but I am in a cycle of thinking and I tend to view and review until my thinking comes clear.

"How do we speak of god without religion i.e. without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness and so on...How do we speak in a secular way about god?"

Bonhoeffer's little comment has fueled a long journey of thinking for me. And I have taken that two-pronged comment, along with similar ideas from others and myself, as a starting point. The one side--the 'temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics' has gained a lot of traction and there is plenty of thinking in that arena , its the 'inwardness' comment that has had me wrestling lately. I think he is talking about the inwardness of subjectivity. Elsewhere and earlier Bonhoeffer writes that,

"we must finally rid ourselves of the notion that the issue...is the personal salvation of the individual soul...in such religious methodology human beings themselves remain the central focus." (you could do yourself a real favour and read Jeffrey Pugh's Religionless Christianity for a much clearer and expanded perspective on these ideas).

It would seem that the consciousness of the world has changed. Mark I. Wallace, in his book, Fragments of the Spirit, names both the 'de-priviledging of metaphysics' and the 'erasure of the self' as two significant challenges to Christianity in the third millennium. What does this mean? Well to me, it heralds a shift in human self-understanding away from the subjective and static view of the self, bequeathed to us by the Greeks and others that has driven our understanding of the self for centuries. I believe this is being eclipsed by a more mobile and fluid understanding of the self, where inwardness is not of prime focus. Two things going on for me--we can reference ourselves without a working hypothesis of God (Vattimo) and we can now consider ourselves without the anthropocentric impulse of the Enlightenment.

What are the implications of this? Well, they are immense. It throws into question how we engage with life, ourselves, each other. It challenges assumptions about what is prioritized in religion--'spiritual disciplines' for instance, in that I believe that most disiciplines are rooted in ideas of the self that no longer hold true (at least for me) and therefore must be revisited. I also think we are liberated to pray as Jesus invited us to pray, i.e. communally--'our father'--it is a form of prayer not anchored to a technology of inwardness. I think I'll stop there because I have things to do but I'll return to flesh this out at a later date. But then I'll talk about prayer, and why I don't.

ignatius loyola

Yesterday was the Feast Day of Ignatius Loyola, the knight who became a priest/hermit/theologian in the middle of the 16th century. He founded the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), a community bound to poverty, chastity and obedience, and later wrote The Spiritual Exercises, which have shaped many a life since then in terms of spiritual practices etc. Most of it lost on me I'm afraid, way too self-negating for my tastes..in his constitutions  of the order he created created a monarchical organization and stressed absolute self-abnegation and obedience to the pope and other religious superiors, the motto for which was "perinde ac si cadaver essent,"--well-behaved like a corpse.

“Let holy obedience, in execution, in the will, and in the intellect, be always utterly perfect in us; let us obey with great promptness, spiritual joy, and perseverance whatever may be commanded of us, persuading ourselves that all things are just, and by a blind obedience giving up our own contrary opinion or judgment; this applies to whatever things are commanded by the Superior, unless it can be shown that some kind of sin is involved. Let everyone persuade himself that those who live under obedience must let themselves be led and ruled by divine providence through their superiors, as if they were a corpse which allows itself to be carried here and there and treated in any way, or like an old man’s cane which permits itself to be used anywhere and in any way that the man who holds it wishes.”

The reason for mentioning all of this however, has nothing to do with any of this save for a prayer that is attributed to Ignatius that my school headmaster used to pray at every single assembly of my English upper-school life.

Lord, teach me to be generous.
Teach me to serve you as you deserve;
to give and not to count the cost,
to fight and not to heed the wounds,
to toil and not to seek for rest,
to labor and not to ask for reward,
save that of knowing that I do your will.

That prayer has been stuck in my head for forty years or more--it rises up occasionally--it's one of the few things I have memorized and yet I never consciously tried to, it was by osmosis I suppose (or repetition:)). I never thought about it at school, never discussed it or turned to it, but when I finally did start to make some connections with the sacred and with christianity in my later adult life, it was this prayer that first sprang to my mind. The funny thing is that I resist most of it in terms of its focus--way too self-negating and lighting on a way of living that I find very unappealing, so it has become something of a mode of negation. That is not to say that I don't hold it dear, but I hold it dear for things unexplained and way beyond the prayer's focus and intent I think. 

So of course, when it was mentioned yesterday that it was the Feast of Ignatius, I recited it immediately in my mind verbatim, with one exception. We never prayed the first line, 'Lord teach me to be generous.' It's sometimes called the prayer for generosity, but I didn't learn it that way, which is the biggest surprise of all, and that opening line is often left out, funny how we do that, and perhaps then miss the spirit of the piece.

outrospection

I have for a long, long time, been reflecting on the idea of 'religionless christianity' as floated by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in one of his letters from prison. There is undoubtedly a little bit of an 'industry' and lots of speculation around the phrase, especially as bonhoeffer never got to flesh out what he meant as his life was cut short. The are a couple of things he does raise in his conversation,

"What do a church, a community, a sermon, a  liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world? How do we speak of God – without religion, i.e. without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on? How do we speak (or perhaps we cannot now even ‘speak’ as we used to) in a ‘secular’ way about ‘God’? In what way are we ‘religionless-secular’ Christians, in what way are we the ecclesia, those who are called forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favoured, but rather as belonging wholly to the world? In that case Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite different, really the Lord of the world. But what does that mean? What is the place of worship and prayer in a religionless situation? Does the secret discipline, or alternatively the difference (which I have suggested to you before) between
penultimate and ultimate, take on a new importance here? …"

I have been thinking essentially about this sentence for a couple of years--insane, I know, because I havent come to any conclusions yet, but the RSA talk at the top of the post does hint at what I am being drawn towards. This shift from introspection to outrospection in terms of emphasis would seem to be a dynamic of life in the 21st century in many arenas and I think it may be one that religion is slowly coming around to.

One of the challenges I find with institutional or 'organized' religion in general (and I say this principally though my own direct experience with christianity so my views are subjective, intensely speculative and deeply personal and anecdotal) is its fascination with history. It would seem to be in awe of a god who seems to be more interested in the past than the present in virtually every arena from liturgy (whether high or low church expression) to doctrine--there is no future there is only a regirgitation of the past. I don't mean to dismiss history or undercut the importance of tradition, just to highlight the challenge the future presents to communities who must appeal to and honour the past--it's just that honouring the past often means invading the present with ideas and concepts whose sell-by-date is long gone.

This shift from inside to out, from introspection to outrospection would be an example. When we exist in religious environments we often find ourselves governed by the inside--we speak of spirit/soul, of spiritual disciplines which are essentially internal--prayer, contemplation, reading etc. not bad in and of themselves, but...

What if the spiritual discipliines needed for today are not those that are principally internal in nature, what if life is turned inside-out and now what is necessary is outrospection? Of course, Roman Krznaric offers a way to understand what this might look like and it has a certain connection to theology--empathy. Now some might say there is no need to shift anything, internal, spiritual disciplines are designed to help us be different in the world, to be compassionate (as our father in heaven is compassionate), I would argue differently, and I say this as someone who has embedded himslef wuite firmly at times in various kinds of inwardness--you act your way into new ways of thinking and being, not vice-versa. What Kzrznaric and others put forth is more radical than we realize, they are pointing to a necessary shift in consciousness towards the world and perhaps highlighting how dependent we are upon ways of being that were developed in different eras of human history and consciousness. This is something Jeremy Rifkin picks up in his work on The Empathic Civilization,

 

Bonhoeffer identified religion by at least a couple of things--temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics and inwardness (you wish he had said more than "and so on" :)), and wondered what a connection to god would look like apart from those things. Personally I find that in church environments these two elements are significant challenge as they are the heart of the industrial-religious complex, and given the reliance upon past-conditioned assumptions, they are quite difficult to challenge--unless you appeal to life, then lots of people get it and realize that there is a disconnect between the way we live and think most of the week and what happens when we step into a church building.

This comes back to the issue of whether postmodern ideas can live in the church which was raised at Subvert the Norm II, the answer of course is a resounding 'yes' you just have to start talking from life not history and link history and tradition to life not the other way round.

Anyway, no fully-formed ideas, just processing intersections on my way to possible new permutations.

making love to god and other hallucinogens

I've just finshed up a two-week intensive on Postmodern Theology, Film and Youth Culture. The night before it started I decided to revise the whole thing and we spent the ten days exploring the develop of youth culture through the history of teen movies from the 1950s to the present day, developing methodologies, schema and theological ideas along the way. You can't cover everything in ten days so it was a broad-based introduction to a number of things essentially--cultural theory, music theory, postmodern theolog(ies), film theory, youth culture trends and characteristics.

The more interesting discussion of the class was when we explored the late 1960s counter-culture, drugs and the emergence out of youth culture of what came to be known as contemporary christianity. The Hippies and freaks gave rise to Jesus freaks and they gave Jesus to the counter-culture, the church woke up, took them in, domesticated it with a heavy dose of conservative theology and boom! church as most experience it today--that of course was the politically incorrect and historically over-reaching view, but you get the idea. contemporary Christianity emerged out of youth culture, amd more specfically, the counter-cultural aspect of it, and many of its habits and practices were simply re-channelled from the culture into the church--the ecstastic worship, the out-of-body emphasis, the musical styles. People exchanged lovers for Jesus, and he was presented as a 'high' you would never come down from.

This thought did come as a bit of a surprise to some of the students, who had barely thought about hippies, let alone that they may have contributed in some ways to the fashioning of contemporary forms and practices of Christianity.

Preston Shires offers another element of the story in his book, Hippies of the Religious Right, in which he draws a line between the counter-culture and the emergence of the religious right, a line that is not that unrealistic if you do some research. he also offers the idea that evangelicalism may be shifting towords a more moderate position as young people chase a different set of values, something that Tony Jones hints at in a recent blog post.

Most of my reflections were around the ways in which a particualr form of music--psychadelic rock--gave way to other major genres--prog-rock, heavy metal and country rock, and from one of them, namely, country rock, which was nurtured in California, came the genesis of Christian music and along with it, the same 'out-of-body' desire of the youth culture playing and experiencing it-just watch Woodstock and then look at people in wirship the next time you find yourself in a contemporary worship environment--the physicality is not much different and nor is the purpose in the music, which is to achieve an essentially 'altered state.'

There is a lot more to be said about this and I am thinking of taking it a little further in my own study and research. Of course, it is not the only contributor to the emergence of contemporary christian practice and presence, but it's a major one.

 

homebrewed

I've been hanging out with some frequency with my friends, Tripp Fuller and Bo Saunders, participating in live podcasts of their woldly successful Homebrewed Christianity podcasts. We usually so them at Monkish Brewery, or some other, establishment purveying the brewed nectar which is the lifeblood of Mr. Fuller, but this past Memorial Day, we did a somewhat impromptu podcast in Tripp's backyard. Musical guest was Bill Mallonnee, whose songs about America and insightful repartee are a great combo. I talked with Tripp and Bo about music woirth knowing about this year, and we got into a fairly intense and broad conversation about music in general. The show is slated to go online in the next week or so and I think we may have another larger, live event in a couple of weeks--check in one the site to stay informed.

Fallen Angels Radical Reincarnation: music is my church

Music has always been my church. I might go to buildings and participate in rituals and even make a living by involvement and engagement with more traditionally understood examples of church/religion, but in my heart music is my religion, my church, my heart. it was in music that I found a space to voice and hear voiced my desire, my melancholy, my sexuality, everything. I remember with a fondness not reserved for many other things in my heart, when I bought my first record player, a Dansette, very similar, if not identical to the one in the image. It wasn't the machine itself, it was what it represented--liberation from the family 'sound system', the radio choices of my parents, the tyranny of a world shaped by ideas, values and aesthetics that meant very little to me as I tried to give voice to my own. That record player became a shrine upon which I sacrificed faithfully the artifacts of my faith--the blues, gospel, r+b, soul, reggae--with a fervour and zeal that was a visceral response to the thing that offered me freedom and a path to knowing and finding myself.

I've just started reading a book about Nick Cave called The Art of Nick Cave: New Critical Essays--its edited by John H. Baker. Its a collection of essays about Nick Cave, his music, his writing, his persona etc., divided into five sections: songwriter, murder ballads, film and theatre, influences and sacred vs. profane. It might just be that those five categorizations of Cave's life and work sum up in some way the way music functions as church or religion for me--if nothing else they highlight the issues and challenges which inform and affirm aspects of my life as I journey through it.

I haven't got too far into the book yet, but so far, it is rich with things about Cave, but perhaps more importantly, about music and about life, which I am finding helpful and hinting at things I might want to revisit, redress and rethink in terms of my own life vis-a-vis, what I do, why I do it, and how I broker some obvious disconnects which I am finding very troubling and difficult at the moment.

I think it is fair to say that I am in something of a vocational, if not life, crisis at the moment. Crisis seems a harsh word when I write it, there might be other words that could capture my present state, but I'll let it stand. 

Radical Reincarnation

In his introduction to the book, John Baker explores the role that Cave, as actor and musician, plays in Wim Wenders film, Wings of Desire. He also links Cave's dichotomy of desire and the emotional, psychological and existential cost to human existence to the central characters in that film. In naming Cave a version of Damiel, the central angel in Wender's story, Baker likens Cave's songwriting to a fallen angel, whose fall if you like, allows him to explore empathy and catharsis and invite insight and release to himself and the listener to his work. There is a line the author writes that grabbed me,

'He (Damiel) recognizes that the only way in which this desire can be fulfilled is through a kind of radical reinacarnation: his transformation from angel into human. In that sense he risks, like Lucifer, a form of fall from the spiritual into the material world.' This is beautiful imagery, I am sure to some who hold a different view of things religious, where the idea of 'fall' is endowed with ideas of disconnection with the sacred, the act might seem disastrous, but to me the fall is the only way Damiel can realize his desire, the only way he can discover love. The path to 'salvation' to reincarnation-re-birth-lies in this kind of provocative and dangerous act of counter-move. Richard Rohr's book of last year, Falling Upwards puts a safer spin on it, but that sheen of positivism is the essential thing I am trying to overcome in terms of my own relation to the sacred.. I keep having these images of falling to the ground, they have been inhabiting my dream world for a while. At first I was a bit worried, it seemed somewhat final, destructive, but lately I am beginning to see it in a different light, as pathway to my own radical reincarnation--I have been falling dramatically into the material world over the past few years, it often seems to be viewed as the 'wrong direction' by peers and by religion in general, but for me, this 'form of fall' heralds a way to realize a certain desired transformation.

Unspoken Unsatisfied

Having spoken of coming to terms with a certain redirection, at least internally, I must also speak of my continuing belief that satisfaction will remain elusive for me, and again, perhaps I am coming to terms with some things about myself, but perhaps also about life in general. In a chapter of Cave's music, not just the lyrical preoccupation through which most address him, there is a quote from Giorgio Agamben that meant something to me the moment I read it. The author of the chapter, Carl Lavery makes a distinction in his offering between Cave the person and Cave the singer,

"To use Giorgio Agambens' vocabulary, the name, 'Cave,' in this chapter, is posited as an authorial 'gesture,' a proper noun that 'marks the point at which a life is offered up and played out in the work. Offered up and played out, not expressed or fulfilled. For this reason the author can only remain unsatisfied and unsaid in the work.'

Two things, one is that I think this is why my favourite songs/artists and those whose work expresses dichotomy, tension, paradox and melancholy--whether it is the plaintive joy of blues and gospel or the apocalyptic musings of Radiohead, it is more often not, the ache in popular music that most speaks to me when it all comes right down to it. It is not that I need to be continually reminded of what is missing or lost (I love 'happy music' too, but there is always that 'thing' lurking beneath the surface) but that inherent tension and release mechanism in some music is what drives my love for it-- I just don't always need sheen and veneer to make everything pretty and ok. 

That melancholy, rooted at the heart of music that emerges from dislocation, disorientation, despair, desire, is what keeps music church for me and it might just be why I struggle with the institutional expressions of church/religion. It lacks melancholy and therefore, for me, it lacks the one ingredient that makes it vital, necessary. As Richard Kearney has written, melancholy brings us to the limits of reason--which for me is ultimately the place where communion with the sacred truly begins. Guardini declares that melancholy issues from 'the very ruptured depths of human nature whose disquietude is a sign of the eternal.' So there's that.

The other thing with regard to this statement is that I too have a name (much lesser of course), a voice, a role, that is public, that is performance--in academia and establishment--and both are difficult. I have spent a long time attempting to merge both public and private voice, and that hasn't proven easy--there are some serious obstacles in both environments that have to do with assumptions, perceptions etc. and I think I have spent way too much time trying to be 'heard' rather than judged or analyzed or critiqued--and I don't mean that in a 'victimy' way, I just mean that the liberation of a musical voice is that it is 'otherness,' the melancholic preoccupation, is almost a given,whereas in the church/theological worlds I inhabit it tends to be viewed as something peripheral, again, at least in my own experience which is the only perspective I can hold with deep conviction. Part of this is the need to find one's audience--not something that I have been too good at, I seem to have been capable of putting myself in environments, that, for want of a better word, are more conservative in both perspective and practice than I, which then heralds tensions and troubles, both great and small.  The 'gesture' voice, the public voice for the performance of theology and religion, is one that I have spent many years working on. I came across a quote from John Wesley that every (man) should strive to be a voice and not an echo, which is lifework and maturity, but once the process of discovery has begun that voice then has to find it's hearing and that I'm still working on--not that people don't listen, or that I even need them to, I need to hear my voice in its right place in both inside and outside.

System to the Sacred

"Cave's sacred is part prophetic Jesus, part Father in the Christian tradition, part Old testament force of retribution, part metonym for human love and sexual energy, part violent power with unknown capabilities, part absence, part extension of the Cave ego. Is there a system to Cave's sacred?" Lyn McCredden.

Does my 'system of the sacred' fit? Fit in the containers I attempt to put it in? Fit in the worlds I seek to express it in? Yes and no, that's probably true of all systems I imagine, but before that perhaps I have to ask if I even have a system? Or if I even know what it is. Increasingly I do--it is not the same as Cave's but there are crossovers for sure. What I cherish particularly about Cave's work is that it is both church in and of itself and it often addresses the other church in my existence--the institutional religion of Christianity--and I sense affinity between he and I on many things not least of which is his conviction that institutional religion is more often than not an unhelpful container. But he is out of it, and I am in it. Am I better or worse for that positioning? Lately, I have been feeling that I am completely fucked by it--it has been my working life--which raises complex issues of material need versus vocational practice-desire, sublimation, games without frontiers in some ways--but it is a continual source of concern, worry, a beast that refuses to be tamed and wants to eat my heart out at times, or at least that's how it feels. And of course, it could just be that it is not a suitable container for me, for my system of the sacred, as I realize that it is still viable for many people--and I don't mean this to be a broadside moan about church etc. I am speaking purely of myself. I am not sure it is necessary to state fully, or as fully as I able, my system, but I can say that after many years I find that much of it is not the system others around me are working from, and that's fine, but ...

"how can inspiration or for that matter God be moral?" Cave's question resonates deeply. I am sick of moralizing religioisity, sorry just am, I find it completely unhelpful, unimaginative, constricting, inadequate, shallow, easy--do I believe in morality? Of course, but morality that has been rooted essentially in reason doesn't work for me and that is what I encounter much of the time.

I remember musical moments perhaps more than any other, they are inscribed on my heart in a way that other encounters are not, it has always been that way for me--they are the ritual experiences personal and public that have shaped me in deep and abiding ways--I find myself in music, I find others, I sometimes find god-although 'finding god' has never been my primary preoccupation, maybe when it comes down to it, as Jack Caputo says, God doesn't exist, God insists, and music might just be the principal insistence conveyor for me.

(musical accompaniment to this post: trouble will find me, the national-on repeat--gorgeous)

death is not the end: belfast 2.0

"Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds," declares William Shakespseare in Sonnet 94. I was going to use this as the starting place for some of my thinking at the Idolatry of God event in Belfast. Pete had written to me and outlined some ideas for conversations around the idea of death and decay. Well, who would you turn to first for thoughts on death and particualrly decay but WS? He can be a starting place for many issues pertaining to material existence and death is one he handles well. The idea of rotting lilies in this sonnet, one of the 'fair youth' series, which explores his love for a young man, is aimed at the thought that the fairest things are meant to remain fair always, but the surprise is often that those things which seem so fair and beautiful can, when they begin to decay, smell far worse than the things we expect to stink--if you've ever let flower water go unchanged for a while, you'll understand the reference.

I was going to stretch this thought and use it to encompass a conversation about church/religion/belief, and the surprise to many, that our experience of it can, and actually must, undergo a decay, if there is to be any hope of something other in terms of the sacred experience. This is a necessary part of the death process--as Pete himself says, decay is a must--the structure is enacting the death, or words to that effect. The rotting, the festering is the post-death move--its where things really start to smell, to challenge the senses. For me it represents a key theological move, one in which the death is only the beginning of a new process. I think that often the death of god/radical theology movement is viewed as a completely nihilisitc affair--it may be for some but as Dylan declares, for me, death is not the end. More on all this later, just finding moments here and there in the meantime, Here's a very decayed version of Dylans song featuring Cave, McGowan and Minogue:).

 

belfast and the idolatry of god

I was in Belfast, mystic city haunted by the horrors of sectarian violence and the spirit of Van Morrison last week, spending time with my friend Pete and a group of people from various spots around the globe, all gathered to explore some of Pete's theological ideas in the setting and environment that gave rise to them.

It was a few days of intense conversation and engagement with ideas that seek to extend the radical theology conversation into the 21st century, by taking into account the cultural, philosophical and religious shifts that invite new reflections on what it means to talk about God, belief, faith, church etc. The mix of people was something of a surprise to me at first. I think I imagined that it would draw an entirely different group, don't know why just did. But it was a great group, and I think, the right kind of group. There was openness and willingness and desire to not only express concerns and worries, but also to seriously consider some radical departures from conventional wisdom. It also provided an opportuntiy to think out loud and almost 'refine the ideas' in public. Sometimes people ask questions that demand you make sure that you aren't simply sloganeering, that there is substance beyond the provocative statement or theory. The practitioner experience demands an entirely different perspective than theoretical ideas--can they, do they work on the ground? what good is a theory if it cannot be lived out? I have never doubted Pete's work because I knew it came from somewhere concrete, that it was birthed in a community of people attempting to live something out, but it was a good reminder of that, and it was great to be in Belfast and meeting again with some of those people.

There were all kinds of events--lots of talking without a doubt, but enough art, food, music, magicians, experiences a d tours of the city, to keep things fresh and alive. I talked a bit about cultural moments and contexts, about sacredness and the profane, about holy ideas and wholly other views of the divine and Pete and I talked together about re-thinking Paul--something that philosophers are doing in earnest, and something I feel that theologians and practitioners need to be engaged in with similar intenstiy and focus.

I came back on Saturday and jumped back into my regualr life at full speed, so more thoughts later--but it was good.

dark was the night cold was the ground

This song by Blind Willie Johnson is going to form the backbone of my talk at the Vigil tonight.

good friday

Crucifixion According to Radiohead | All I Need from scott erickson on Vimeo.

 http://createvisualculture.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/cruciformity-stations-on-skin-the-designs-and-invite/