Creatively Advancing into Novelty
Munch: When Munch was a boy… freedom was a potato. It was you didn’t get killed today. Freedom from hunger, from the rusty blade. But to free himself, the man ate first so others could not. He killed before he was killed. He wanted nothing more, because only kings… had the freedom to want. But…
“Evil is not eliminated by a destructive retributive judgment, but by an aesthetic synthesis of intensity, order, and harmony. Whitehead’s God is not a cosmic judge; rather, God is a cosmic artist. The many poor paintings of individual lives and events are transformed in a continuous aesthetic process of harmonizing the parts with an ideal…
Regular Tendencies Settled Into I tell myself to think of something else and find that I’m back there with you, alone, by the window talking to the wind. A lonely and anxious fear. Tightness that I would like to untie, but the fretful anguish arrives; natal homing, not unlike a salmon riding on the back…
“It is certainly the case that many cultural traditions with their varying modes of reasoning are already embedded within Christianity. The Bible alone contains texts that celebrate different and sometimes conflicting accounts of the world, exposing a range of rationalities that are expressed in a variety of genres. But even more important for theology’s work…
“When I say my life is not mine, I mean to say that my life is lived through many others, because of many others, by many others, and in lieu of many others. I breathe only because the air moves and because some tree somewhere did not withhold its breath; I stand because the ground…
“Art makes sense of the world through a material process – some thing is the end result of the artistic act. Whether a story, a painting, a song, a rock sculpted to create a new form – there are not neat, easily delineated distinctions argued within discreet sections and paragraphs – a process of dissection…
“When the “One” becomes invisible again, this is really not about the loss of monism, but of dualism. The disappearance of dualism is really a condition for the liberation of multitude. Gilles Deleuze has the formula that as soon as dualism vanishes “monism is pluralism.” The same strategy, I think, appears in Loomer’s theopoetic language…
Theopoetics guides a literary artist toward contextualizing experience and shepherds the intangibility of experience into art, turning confused isolation into a reach for the communal, all with an eye toward faith, hope, and love — charity in its true sense. It’s this act of making incarnate coupled with the intention of pursuing the divine that…
Many people of faith feel a desire to speak about that which is most precious to them, about that which has transformed their lives, that which they feel has liberated them. Yet that needs to be contrasted with the concern that every time we speak of that source, that place of liberation, we somehow do…
What theology needs is more copulation. And postmodern theopoetics may well provide it. The word copulation, of course, denotes coupling: the bringing together and/or union of two things. The related words “copula” and “copulative” are grammatical terms, used to describe the linking of elements in a sentence. How unfortunate, then, that the fertile term copulation…