“But you must just answer a last question. Two equally old trees are growing in a large garden. One of the trees grows in a sunny spot and has plenty of good soil and water. The other tree grows in poor soil in a dark spot. Which of the trees do you think is bigger?…
Category
Philosophy
The Light Can Be Blinding | Art by Izziyana Suhaimi
Paul’s blinding conversion and Jesus’ time in the desert are both examples of graphical entries into Heidegger’s ‘clearing’, of coming up on the truer core of ourselves and the different light that eliminates us there. They are, in the fullest sense, moments of enlightenment. Yet, strangely, they are also within the corpus of what we…
Made As Makers: A theopoetic motion picture that teaches us how to talk about the things that matter most.
……………… I was recently asked by one of my favorite educator/poet/theologians, Callid Keefe-Perry, to review his new 45-minute documentary film, Made As Makers. I felt honored. ……………… “Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot name them” ~Dana Gioia To paraphrase the illustrative Peter Rollins, many people of faith feel a desire to…
Mistook Sign for Signified | mewithoutYou: Ten Stories
Provisionally eyed, practically alive, mistook sign for signified, And so sins have often tried to run him off a cliff like Gadarene swine Inside my wardrobe seem anchor bent, Wondering whether we were someone better then… Or maybe just better able to pretend, And what better means to our inevitable end? You know, I don’t…
The Buffered Self | Art by Ryan Browning
The modern view of the self, the view that dominates within the psychotherapeutic community, is characterized by what Charles Taylor has called the “buffered self.” For a variety of reasons, which Taylor describes in his book A Secular Age, the modern notion of self-hood became introverted and individualistic, the self as isolated and distinct (“buffered”)…
Exceptional Art & Alluring Art or What Makes Some Art More Important Than Other Art
In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it. The above quote comes from German educator Ernst Fischer. His view of art’s purpose and place in society closely…
Are we stuck in an eternal state of adolescence?
In current Western and Westernized societies, in addition to the scarcity of true maturity, many people of adult age suffer from a variety of adolescent psychopathoogies–incapacitating social insecurity, identity confusion, extremely low self-esteem, few or no social skills, narcissism, relentless greed, arrested moral development, recurrent physical violence, materialistic obsessions, little or no capacity for intimacy…
Diogenes the Dog; So you want to be a Cynic do you?
Diogenes was the first of a group of thinkers who became known as the Cynics, a term taken from the Greek kunikos, meaning “dog-like.” It reflects the determination of the Cynics to spurn all forms of social custom and etiquette, and instead live in as natural a state as possible. They asserted that the more…
Arresting of The Beautiful || Illustration by Sana Pearl Park
And, of course, the temple par excellence of culture is the modern museum in which the objects of art seamlessly mirror back to us the satisfaction (repressed, unconscious as it is) of our teleological drive to historical mastery bewitching ourselves into thinking we have achieved it. Art in this sense is double-edged: it is not…
God Has Breasts and Is Not Omnipotent
The bible never says that God is omnipotent or that he created out of nothing… We get our modern ideas of Gods omnipotence from the Hebrew name El-Shaddai wich is most often translated as “the almighty” but many scholars today suggest that God of the two mountains or the large breasted one would be a…