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Bishop Eddie Long (who, by the way, is currently fighting allegations of sexual misconduct) has apparently forbidden his congregation (some 25,000 people) from reading Karen Spears Zacharias' book Will Jesus Buy Me a Double-Wide?: ('Cause I Need More Room for My Plasma TV). Click here to see Zacharias' blog post about the banning, and see the video below to learn a little about the book itself.
Duke Divinity School celebrated the installation of Dean Richard B. Hays on Aug. 31 with a performance in Goodson Chapel of The Holy Sonnets of John Donne by Benjamin Britten.
Dean Hays, the 12th dean of Duke Divinity School, introduced the public performance with reflections about the theology of Donne’s Holy Sonnets.
Elizabeth Byrum Linnartz, a lecturing fellow in Duke’s Department of Music, was the soloist and also presented a lecture on Britten's expression of mood and meaning prior to the musical performance. She was accompanied on piano by Jeremy Begbie, the Thomas A. Langford Research Professor of Theology at the Divinity School.
The concert marked the first event of the year for the Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts, which Begbie directs. The event was a collaboration of DITA, the Divinity School, and the Duke University Department of Music.
Learn more.Performance: The Holy Sonnets of John Donne by Benjamin Britten from Duke Divinity School on Vimeo.
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The Duke Arts Festival takes place Oct. 22 - Nov. 7. Student artists are invited to submit work in all media forms including, but not limited to, painting, photography, poetry, sculpture, mixed media, digital art, animation, film, video, music, dance and poetry. Submissions will be displayed in a public exhibit in the Bryan Center during the festival. A jury of students and arts department faculty will select visual art works for exhibition in the Bryan Center’s Louise Jones Brown Gallery — a gallery that traditionally exhibits the work of professional artists. Prizes will be awarded for works selected as Best of Show.
Full article here // Excerpt belowThe word, which has become an all-purpose exclamation that spread from Valley Girls to much of American teenagerdom, has lost its spiritual punch and dignity, say the authors of a new book for the High Holy Days that tries to bring the prayers in tune with contemporary times.
The authors prefer “awe-inspiring.”
“If you say God is awesome, you are immediately in street language, rather than inspiring language,” said Rabbi Edward Feld, who headed the committee that over 12 years wrote and translated the new book.
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The first thing I thought about after reading this article was the song "Awesome God" by Rich Mullins. Somehow that song still imparts to me something of the original meaning of the word "awesome"--maybe it's the dramatic use of the flat-7 chord (sorry, music geek here). But at what point do English words get so emptied of their forcefulness that they are no longer useful for the same things?
Say we were to update the hymns and prayers in the United Methodist Hymnal. What sorts of changes would we make? I can think of one particularly amusing change that already has been made. One of my favorite hymns (and a lesser-known one) is "Come, O Thou Traveler Unknown." It is a wonderful hymn written by Charles Wesley. Here's how one verse goes in the current edition:
’Tis Love! ’tis Love! Thou diedst for me!
I hear Thy whisper in my heart;
The morning breaks, the shadows flee,
Pure, universal love Thou art;
To me, to all, Thy mercies move;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
Lovely, right? Here's the original of the last two lines:
To me, to all, Thy bowels move;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.
Good grief! Was Chuck (as my worship professor affectionately calls him) referring to God having a bowel movement?! Well, no--as it turns out, an archaic English use of the word "bowels" meaning great depth or a gut feeling of yearning or compassion (per this book, excerpts of which are available on Google Books). That's great, but it's not really practical to pause during a hymn to explain strange wording that probably already has a few more irreverent types (myself included) rolling with laughter. It's almost too bad, because if you think about it, "bowels" gets at a sort of physicality of God's love and mercy that just doesn't come out in more abstract terms. But moving bowels now evokes images of porcelain and bad magazines, so the change is absolutely worthwhile.
On another note, in this article, Rabbi Feld sets up a contrast between "street language" and "inspiring language." When might the two be one? What do you think about things like The Hip Hop Prayer Book by Timothy Holder?
-- Sarah
Full Article Here // Excerpt BelowLee Gilmore, a lecturer in religious studies and anthropology at California State University at Northridge, had an epiphany one night in the Nevada desert, brought on by visions of the Virgin Mary, the Buddha, and Elvis Presley. She had ventured out there for Burning Man, an annual festival held during the week leading up to Labor Day in the Black Rock Desert, about 120 miles north of Reno.
The product of her subsequent ethnographic study of the festival is Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man, out recently from the University of California Press. Based mainly on structured interviews and informal conversations with festival participants—as well as surveys of more than 300 people who participate in the Nevada festival or one of several regional spin-offs—the book makes the case that spiritual imagery, thinking, and ritual abound at Burning Man, even if the organizers and most participants soundly reject any effort to tie the event to any sort of religion.
Wired Science has posted some incredible images from NASA of the first complete topographic map of the moon. These magical images also serve a practical function. They create a way of seeing and analyzing the formation and development of our solar system by way of its craters. Our planet has a shared history with the moon: “Among other things, the map confirms theories of an onslaught of massive asteroids around 3.9 billion years ago that likely evaporated any water present on Earth at the time.”
There’s a lesson here too. If we point our lens at something a bit nearer to us — whether it’s an interstellar object or the neighbor next door — we just may learn something about ourselves, and our future. Or at least we’ll see new beauty in the familiar, both near and far.
Many of the most prominent and celebrated artists of the 20th century have employed religious themes, iconography, and forms in their work. However, many have been ignored, dismissed as aberrant, or condemned as an improper combination of incompatible traditional and avant-garde values. We seek 20-minute papers for a Symposium to be held day prior to CAA meeting in New York Feb 8, 2011 that examine specific examples of art from the 20th century employing religious subjects, symbols, and contexts. Paper proposals of no more than two pages double-spaced should be submitted with a cover letter and c.v. by Oct 1 to James Romaine (drjamesromaine@gmail.com) and Rachel Smith (rcsmith@taylor.edu). It is hoped that symposium participants will also contribute to the development of the Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art. Also see: http://christianityhistoryart.org.
There will be a fund-raising performance featuring The Resurrection Dance Theatre of Haiti, an internationally recognized dance troupe of orphans, former street children, and child slaves from Haiti. The young men are affiliated with the St. Joseph Family, which was formed under the leadership of Michael Geilenfeld 25 years ago to bring street children into a Christian family setting. Two of the family’s three homes that housed over 55 children were destroyed in the January earthquake. The dance troupe is touring the U.S. and Canada to raise awareness.
Tickets are $10 for general admission, $8 for Duke faculty and staff, and $5 for students and senior citizens. All proceeds will benefit the St. Joseph Family in Haiti.
Read Miracles Beyond Miracles in the Spring 2010 edition of DIVINITY Magazine to learn more about the St. Joseph Family.
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by Michael Cieply
TORONTO — On Monday night here, 3-D may have found its future in the distant past. Certainly, Werner Herzog broke some ground by screening a new documentary, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” in 3-D.
“Cave of the Forgotten Dreams” is an examination of the paintings in the Chauvet Cave of Southern France. Discovered in 1994, the paintings are believed to be 35,000 years old. Only a handful of scientists and care-takers have access to the cave, but Mr. Herzog was permitted to shoot there.
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by The Associated Press
A Muslim stonemason who spent nearly four decades helping to restore a Roman Catholic cathedral in France has been immortalized as a winged gargoyle peering out from its facade — with the inscription "God is great" written in French and Arabic. It was conceived as a symbol of inter-religious friendship that reflects the city of Lyon's links to its large Muslim population.
Full Article Here // Excerpt BelowThe blast from one detonation hurled a man and his camera into a ditch. When he got up, a second wave knocked him down again.
Then there was radiation.
While many of the scientists who made atom bombs during the cold war became famous, the men who filmed what happened when those bombs were detonated made up a secret corps. Their existence and the nature of their work has emerged from the shadows only since the federal government began a concerted effort to declassify their films about a dozen years ago. In all, the atomic moviemakers fashioned 6,500 secret films, according to federal officials.
Even before the economic collapse of 2008, architects -- and young architects in particular -- had turned away from designing splashy new icons and toward anti-poverty projects, disaster relief and other kinds of community-minded work. Now that financing for the architecture of spectacle has all but disappeared, that alternative grassroots approach, broadly known as "humanitarian design," has found itself in an increasingly bright spotlight. It will get even brighter on Oct. 3 when the Museum of Modern Art in New York opens an exhibition called "Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement."
Attendance is down. At the water cooler, they’re talking about “Mad Men.” It’s hand-wringing time for cinephiles.
Broadway this season is the land of second chances for celebrities looking to reignite their careers and for plays that failed miserably in their first outings.
New fall sitcoms (like “Raising Hope” and “Outsourced”) and dramas (“My Generation”) suggest a pervasive national sense of pessimism and decline.
Coming exhibitions provide familiarity with the rest of the world’s art, which means exposure to ideas and values that keeps museumgoers in the cosmopolitan loop.
The dance season includes Merce Cunningham’s “Xover” and a world premiere “Nutcracker” by Alexei Ratmansky for American Ballet Theater.
Kings of Leon, a grungy, nervy Southern rock band, has developed into full-fledged American hit makers, a commercial but unsettling position.
