camera as sacrament
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I’ve been enjoying James K A Smith’s essays in The Devil Reads Derrida. Given photographic theme for this blog, the following seemed appropriate to quote (OK, so he is taking about movies, but I think we can borrow it for a wider application!)
…the camera functions a sacrament and bestows sacramentality: it is both a means of grace and an instrument by which the world is endued with grace. Through the lens and in the film, the world becomes sacramentum mundi. At stake here is an ontology which understands the structures of the world — even the most mundane, even the most ‘ugly’ — as harbouring a revelatory trajectory…
At stake here finally is a liturgy; insofar as the camera is a sacrament, the film becomes a medium for grace and revelation … the camera gaze trains our own eye to see differently, so that eventually we can see the world … as a site of revelation. In this way, the cinema … is the site for a discipleship of the eye.
everything
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I’ve written a couple of articles for the Everything Conference website, which you might be interested in: God, Guinness and the Avant-Garde and The Reason for Science.
Andy Crouch is the speaker at the conference itself, in March. Should be an interesting day.
form, content and incarnation
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A poem, as Mallarme once said, is not made of ideas but of words, and faith also expresses itself through that which is lived, breathed, uttered, left silent.
Kathleen Norris
If I am honest, I am a poor reader of poetry for this very reason: I am always trying to look through the words to reach the ideas. I skip too quickly past the words themselves in a hope to find the reason behind them. I don’t think I am alone. Frequently interactions with art are more concerned with the ideas than the medium.
Our visual world today is dominated by a need for information. Once we have the information, the visual is disposable.
Edward Knippers
We are more worried with ‘What is the artist trying to say here?’ instead of how has it been shaped and formed in particular materials. But the art is not a message that can be transferred without change from one medium to another. If Rembrandt had written novels, they would not simply be his paintings in narrative form, but something utterly different.
We may speak of the theme of a work of art but we should never do so as if the theme is something that can be detached from the work’s form. Form is meditation: it makes something intangible known to us — in and through tangible words, gestures, materials.
Gregory Wolfe
Art is always a wrestling with some raw material, even if that material is something as common place as words or stories or life. In the end, the ideas are shaped by the medium even as the medium is shaped by the ideas. For this reason, art always has a truth component, even if the artist’s ideas do not correspond with reality. Always reality imposes itself through the medium. A story must be coherent with our understanding of the world; and even if we try to express meaninglessness, we are forced to used the meaning inherent in words and images to do so.
With this gospel of incarnation, then, and only then, it is possible to speak of fusing spirit and body, content and form. Christ’s incarnation resolves the most difficult dichotomy that exists for an artist; that is the dichotomy of form and content. … Christ’s uniqueness lies in not just the content (divinity) but also in the form (humanity).
Makoto Fujmura
It seems that, as with art, we have a tendency to run past the particular person of Jesus in our attempt to reach the transcendent and timeless. We skip quickly past who he was and the things he did as we try to get to the ideas. But a life is not made only of ideas but of moments and actions, of living and breathing. If the incarnation is God’s self-giving art then we see Him engaging, maybe even wrestling, with the raw materials of human life, experience and existence. And the life of Jesus is not just an arbitrary form for the content. The expression is found in the way the raw materials are shaped and used.
We must learn to speak in the light of this Jesus about the identity of the one true God.
N.T.Wright
two sides of stewardship
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
It seems that, from a Christian perspective at least, cultural practice has two sides — to conserve what is present in creation and to develop it in new and fresh ways. We can see this in the Genesis 2 account: God creates man ‘to cultivate and keep’ the garden, with overtones of both conservation and development.
Looking around, it is intriguing to see these two sides of the task translate into the attitudes people have towards culture. Fearlessly caricaturing, we have on one side the progressive inclination, where everything new is implicitly good and tradition is suspect; and on the other side we have the conservative inclination, where everything new is suspect and traditional values, practices, etc. are held tight without question.
We see these opposing views in all areas of life from art and architecture to theology and philosophy to tools and technology. Observation suggests that people tend to have a natural tendency to one of the two. And it seems hard to keep a balance between them, with those of one inclination battling hard against the other as if everything depends on keeping the old or progressing to the new. Take theology as an example, where any, ahem, new perspective seems quickly to be judged interesting or problematic based on the novelty.
Perhaps, we need to keep Genesis 2 in mind and realise that it is precisely a balance that we need. For us to steward faithfully, we need to both progress and conserve. To do one is to grind to halt; to do the other is to run amok with ever changing ideas. But, more than that, if we are naturally drawn to one side, we need to keep in mind that the other perspective is needed for us, corporately, to fulfil our calling.
Makoto Fujimura demonstrates one side of this in a recent talk. Discussing the difficulty of obtaining traditional paper and other materials for his artworks, he notes that without the effort to preserve traditional crafts we will not be able to make culture. On the other side, in Political Visions and Illusions, David Koyzis notes that every part of culture that conservatives hold on to was ‘originally a product of innovation’.
So, true stewardship of creation and culture needs to weave together the threads of both conserving and developing, of tradition and innovation. And this can only be done with communities which can value people with both inclination and find the appropriate blend of the two.
Makoto Fujimura’s Letter to Churches
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Artists: Create for our Father, improvise with the Spirit. Create through the Medium who binds all things together, and then you will begin to hear sounds of “the world that ought to be.” Surely, there will be birth pangs right up to that time. There will be more “Ground Zeros” created by destructive minds, twisting creative impulses into diabolical powers. Undo what they have done. Stand upon those ashes all around us, and open your hearts: look up, to Create in Love.
Makoto Fujimura from A Letter to North American Churches
to change the world & soft difference
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
With all the discussion that James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World has generated, it seems a good time to point out that Miroslav Volf’s excellent essay ‘Soft Difference’ is available as a pdf on the website of the Yale Centre of Faith and Culture.
In this paper, Volf considers how the church should interact with culture based on a close reading of 1 Peter. Reading Volf’s paper alongside Hunter’s book, it’s easy to see the influence of Volf’s discussion on the faithful presence idea (&, I suspect, on a number of other perspectives on culture). For instance, take these key paragraphs:
Christians do not come into their social world from outside seeking either to accommodate to their new home (like second generation immigrants would), shape it in the image of the one they have left behind (like colonizers would), or establish a little haven in the strange new world reminiscent of the old (as resident aliens would). They are not outsiders who either seek to become insiders or maintain strenuously the status of outsiders. Christians are the insiders who have diverted from their culture by being born again. They are by definition those who are not what they used to be, those who do not live like they used to live. Christian difference is therefore not an insertion of something new into the old from outside, but a bursting out of the new precisely within the proper space of the old.
…the Petrine community … did not wish to impose itself or the kingdom of God on the world, but to live in faithfulness to God and to the values of God’s kingdom, inviting others to do the same. It had no desire to do for others what they did not want done for them. They had no covert totalitarian agenda. Rather, the community was to live an alternative way of life in the present social setting, transforming it, as it could, from within. In any case, the community did not seek to exert social or political pressure, but to give public witness to a new way of life.
Here we find the rejection of ‘relevant to’/'defensive against’/'purity from’; with the alternative of living faithfully and transforming from within.
But Volf adds something that doesn’t come out in Hunter’s analysis — the dynamic picture of ‘bursting out of the new precisely within the proper space of the old’. Here we have a new creation/resurrection type image that adds a new dimension over ‘faithful presence’ and introduces an interesting new facet. The key from this perspective is that the church is not filled with outsiders to the culture, but with re-born insiders. Hence
The question of how to live in a non-Christian environment, then, does not translate simply into the question of whether one adopts or rejects the social practices of the environment. This is the question outsiders ask, who have the luxury of observing a culture from a vantage point that is external to that culture. Christians do not have such a vantage point since they have experienced a new birth as inhabitants of a particular culture. Hence they are in an important sense insiders. As those who are a part of the environment from which they have diverted by having been born again and whose difference is therefore internal to that environment, Christians ask, “Which beliefs and practices of the culture that is ours must we reject now that our self has been reconstituted by new birth? Which can we retain? What must we reshape to reflect better the values of God’s new creation?”
…we should not lose sight of the rich diversity within any given culture and therefore of the multiple ways in which the gospel relates to it, such as being “against the culture” and “converting the culture,” ”subverting the culture” and in some sense being even “of the culture” all at the same time.
Despite quoting some reasonable chunks of the essay, this really only touches a small part of Volf’s discussion, so do go and have a look at the whole thing. And particularly if you’re thinking through Hunter’s book — Volf’s essay is a valuable addition to the conversation. Particularly if you want to add to the theological underpinning.
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...