Taste and Parody collide with Art and Music

The Indie Band Hold Your Horses! web link

70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! (official music video)

Matching the Art with the Scenes

What the Master Pieces Meant

Matching the Art with the Scenes

70 Million Lyrics
Hold Your Horses!

And it hardly looked like a novel at all,
I hardly look like a hero at all
And I'm sorry, you didn't publish this
And you were white as snow; I was white as a sheet

When you came down in this black dress
In your mom's black maternity dress
And so,
Though it hardly looked like a novel at all,
And the city treats me, it treats me to you
And a cup of coffee for you
I should learn it's language and speak it to you

And 70 million should be in the know
And 70 million don't go out at all
And 70 million wouldn't walk this street
And 70 million would run to a hole
And 70 million would be wrong wrong wrong
And 70 million never see it at all
And 70 million haven't tasted snow

And we dance dance dance like the children dance
Imply thought are we taking the chance?
With the light still on, and will we ever reach the tower

And after you came down in this black dress
I don't know what took so very long
And this,
And this isn't a war, we don't have to ration
Now wave white flag, and you kept it at home
And words I wrote from a foreign land
You're holding my no longer foreign hand

And 70 million should be in the know
And 70 million don't go out at all
And 70 million wouldn't walk this street
And 70 million would run to a hole
And 70 million would be wrong wrong wrong
And 70 million never see it at all
And 70 million haven't tasted snow

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In the music video for the song "70 Million," indie pop band
Hold Your Horses! interprets 25 paintings, including
Magritte's  The Son of Man. | L'Ogre

PLAYING GOD, JESUS, AND LIBERTY

http://www.artnews.com/2010/05/01/playing-god-jesus-and-liberty/

by Jeremy D. Goodwin

May 1, 2010

How a rock band restaged art-history classics for a music video that went viral.

As Salome carries his head on a silver platter, John the Baptist opens his eyes and sings a merry little melody to the camera.

That scene -- enacted by members of the French-American indie pop band Hold Your Horses! -- helped turn the music video for their song “70 Million” into a viral hit on the Internet, viewed nearly 300,000 times within two weeks of its being posted on the Web site Vimeo.

But it wasn’t this live-action re-staging of Caravaggio‘s Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist alone that did it. The three-minute video, created by the small production house L’Ogre, careens through 25 tableaux vivants of iconic works, ranging from Velázquez‘s Las Meninas to Munch‘s The Scream, from Manet‘s Olympia to Klimt‘s The Kiss.

All this art history was filmed over two weekends in a parking garage in Paris, using chalk drawings as backdrops and a smoke machine for fog. To re-create the cloudy sky in Michelangelo‘s Sistine Chapel ceiling, the production team ripped out the stuffing from 200 pillows. “The idea was to make the paintings youthful and funny and rock-and-roll,” the video’s director, David Freymond, says. “We were not trying to be too academic.”

The video begins with Jesus, from Leonardo‘s The Last Supper, drumming on a pot with a pair of wooden spoons. Frida Kahlo (from her self-portraits), van Gogh (from his Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear), and Picasso‘s muse Dora Maar (from his Portrait of Dora Maar) are among the recognizable characters taking subsequent turns with the upbeat tune. One band member sings while smoking a cigarette, interpreting Otto Dix‘s Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden.

The music video “breaks with the image of a rock band,” Freymond says. “This poor band has to get naked—to re-create Renaissance paintings.” Well, not entirely naked: the Venus of Botticelli‘s The Birth of Venus wears a guitar as a cover-up.

The irreverent effort—for an enigmatic song the band claims is about the shifting feelings in a romantic relationship—required feats of costuming. A head covering and the perfect piece of jewelry turned guitarist Charles van den Boogaerde into Vermeer‘s Girl with a Pearl Earring. A bowler hat transformed bassist Robin Montmusson into Magritte‘s Son of Man. The same hat, adorned with a feather, appears in a staging of Holbein the Younger‘s Henry VIII.

To become Van Gogh’s sunflowers, band members covered their arms in green paint. Cellist Simon Tordjman had his face painted white, blue, red, yellow, and black to approximate a Mondrian painting. And six of the band’s seven members got to play the part of Warhol‘s Marilyn Monroe. They all wore the same wig, spray-painted a different color for each shot.

Part of the fun is watching unlikely subjects bang out the tune. The cadaver in Rembrandt‘s The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolaes Tulp reaches over to play a few notes on a melodica, for example. In an evocation of Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters, by an unknown 16th-century painter, a shirtless musician sways his head to the beat as he pinches the nipple of a comrade strumming a guitar. In most cases instruments are not in the original artworks, with Chagall‘s The Bride a notable exception: as in the painting, in the music video a goat (or rather a man with a goat mask attached to his head) plays the cello.

Florence Villeminot, drummer and vocalist, has starring roles in the stagings of The Creation of Adam, from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Leonardo’s The Last Supper, and Eugène Delacroix‘s Liberty Leading the People. “I was happy because I got to be God, the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and Liberty. That was my goal when I joined the band,” Villeminot quips.

In order of “appearance” in the Hold Your Horses! music video for “70 Million”:

• Leonardo, The Last Supper (1492–98)
• Botticelli, The Birth of Venus (ca. 1485)
• Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolaes Tulp (1632)
• Holbein the Younger, Henry VIII (ca. 1536)
• Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring (ca. 1665–66)
• Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19)
• Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat (1793)
• Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam (ca. 1511)
• Magritte, The Son of Man (1964)
• Mondrian, after various compositions
• Frida Kahlo, after several self-portraits
• Picasso, Portrait of Dora Maar (1937)
• Munch, The Scream (1893)
• Van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889)
• Warhol, after various Marilyns
• Unknown artist, Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters (ca. 1594)
• Cenni di Pepo, Madonna and Child Enthroned with Six Angels (ca. 1280)
• Caravaggio, Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist (1606–7)
• Manet, Olympia (1863)
• Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (1830)
• Otto Dix, Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926)
• Klimt, The Kiss (1907–8)
• Chagall, The Bride (1950)
• Velázquez, Las Meninas (ca. 1656)
• Van Gogh, Vase with 12 Sunflowers (1888)

Copyright 2015, ARTnews LLC, 40 W 25th Street, 6th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10010. All rights reserved.

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26APR2011

70 million

by whart

This isn’t about an art event/exhibition (I have something else from that I’m still trying to edit) but I found an interesting video – interesting, humorous and pretty creative. It’s a music video for the band Hold Your Horses.

[First question]... How many paintings did you recognize? :)

Anyway, I guess this is a highly relevant video considering that we were discussing how advertising appropriates art in the last lesson. This is a pretty literal example of it, and it is also an example of parody. I think there are two possible implications.

1) The humour is disrespectful to the artworks as it violates their sanctity and doesn’t bring out their original meaning or context context e.g. if you think about how serious and emotional a Van Gogh painting is and how it has been turned into a funny singing man.

Also, the use of art for advertising [music] is objectionable…turning a priceless creation into low entertainment and a way to earn money.

The second one is the one most people will have and the one that I personally had.

2) It is humorous, but not in a malicious way. Seeing old and familiar artworks portrayed in a new way that is not mocking of them, but took creativity to plan and execute, is pleasant and inspiring. It is a lighthearted take on paintings that might otherwise be regarded as serious or boring by most people, and an expression of the band and director’s own creativity.

That is the view I lean more towards, although I won’t deny that the video doesn’t do justice to many of the original artworks’ emotional content and sense of pathos. In that sense I think I am quite pragmatic about art and reproductions…

I would rather a piece of artwork be reproduced, reused, given new meaning and made

relevant to a new audience rather than remain a sacred object that only a few people

are motivated to try and understand on a deeper level. (As long as the meaning is not

in conflict with the old one, and as long as it is not used for banal/unrelated/really

disrespectful like my toilet paper holder.)

It was the same thing when we were having the show and tell with all the appropriated/reproduced art we found and I said about my Coldplay album that I felt it was an acceptable use of art.

I guess you could say that both the video and the album cover do this. They are appropriating the artwork’s of the Old Masters, and on one hand it is a form of advertising (advertising to get people to buy the music) but on the other hand I feel they are creative endeavours in their own right.

The Coldplay album is part of a whole musical concept and idea the band is trying to evoke, while the direction and production of a video is a difficult and creative process. The paintings are the creative works of the past, but these are the creative works of the present, and we can’t deny that they have a broader appeal in today’s world.

Thus, I think it is a mistake to dismiss all reproduction as harmful and disrespectful to art. It isn’t something that can be stamped out or ignored, and like everything else, it has ambiguous and double-edged impacts, and some of these impacts can be positive, inspiring and creative. I feel that if we take all paintings so seriously and deny any kind of perspective or commentary on them other than the serious, classical, respectful one, we are not doing justice to their complexity and the way people relate to them.

-- Grace

5 Things You Didn't Know About Easter

In parts of Spain, Easter celebrations often involve Christians processing through the
streets carrying crucifixes and other religious icons | Andres Kudacki, Associated Press

5 Things You Didn't Know About Easter

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/01/facts-about-easter-you-didnt-know_n_6982358.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000051

The Huffington Post

by Carol Kuruvilla

April 1, 2015

For Christians, Easter is a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ -- and arguably the most important date on the religious calendar. Easter marks the end of Lent, a 40-day period of fasting and reflection. The day holds the promise of victory over death, a new life and the forgiveness of sins.

The first recorded observance of Easter happened in the second century, though it is likely that Christians were celebrating the resurrection much earlier than that. Today, the holy day has inspired a wide variety of traditions -- from Sweden’s trick-or-treating Easter witches to Venezuela’s tradition of burning effigies of Judas.

Here are five little-known facts about the Easter holiday.

1

There’s more than one theory about where Easter got its name.

PAPER BOAT CREATIVE VIA GETTY IMAGES

The word Easter has been linked to Eostre, an Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring and new life. Other scholars trace the name of the holiday to the Latin phrase “hebdomada alba,” which means “white week.” According to tradition, new Christians were baptized into the faith on Easter while wearing white clothes. The phrase evolved into “eostarum” in Old High German, becoming “Ostern” in modern German and “Easter” in English.

But in many other languages, the word for Easter is still deeply tied to Passover, the festival that celebrates the exodus of the Jews from Egypt. Jesus was crucified soon after he arrived in Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover feast.

The Orthodox Church calls Easter “Pascha.” In French, the holiday is known as “Pâques.” In Spanish, it is “Pascua,” and in Dutch, “Pasen.”

2

Easter has always been tied to the moon.

MKOTERA555 VIA GETTY

Since the Jewish calendar is based on lunar cycles, Passover falls on 14 Nisan, the 14th day of the first full moon of spring. Christians in Asia Minor used to remember the crucifixion on the 14 Nisan, and celebrate the resurrection on 16 Nisan. But this meant that Easter could fall on any day of the week. On the other hand, Christians in the West celebrated Easter on the first Sunday after 14 Nisan.

In 325, the Roman Emperor Constantine I gathered bishops from around his empire at the Council of Nicaea to hammer out a solution to this and other debates raging in the early church. The council decided that Easter would be observed on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox.

3

Easter is the reason why we use the Gregorian calendar.

HULTON ARCHIVE VIA GETTY

By the 16th century, scholars had realized that the Roman Empire’s Julian calendar was out of sync with the solar year -- and that Easter was falling further away from the spring equinox. In an effort to close the gap, Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar. But because of old religious rivalries, Protestants in Europe were dead set against the change. It wasn’t until 1752 that England adopted the Gregorian calendar. On that day, the country skipped forward 11 days overnight, going from Wednesday, September 2, to Thursday, September 14. The Gregorian calendar is still the most widely used civil calendar today.

Eastern Orthodox churches still use the Julian calendar to calculate religious holidays. As a result, while most of the Western world will celebrate Easter on April 5 this year, Orthodox churches are celebrating on April 12.

4

The Pilgrims despised Easter celebrations.

BOSTON GLOBE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Christianity in the early New England colonies was very different from Christianity in America today. The Puritans scorned religious holidays like Easter and Christmas, claiming they had pagan roots and lacked a scriptural basis. In fact, the Puritans flat-out outlawed Christmas celebrations in the Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1659 to 1681, slapping rule-breakers with a then-hefty fine of five shillings.

Some Christian denominations are still wary of religious holidays. Jehovah’s Witnesses and many Pentecostal churches, for example, still discourage their members from celebrating Easter.

5

The Easter Bunny barely scratches the surface of this holiday's traditions.

JAIME REINA VIA GETTY IMAGES

When Easter swings around in America, there’s no escaping the Easter Bunny and his colorful basket of eggs. But across the world, Christians have developed many interesting ways of marking the holiday. In Sweden, young girls dress up as Easter Witches and travel from house to house looking for treats. In some parts of Latin America and Greece, Christians burn effigies of Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus. In Venezuela last year, some protesters used the holiday to burn an effigy of their president, Nicolas Maduro. Bermudan Christians fly brightly colored kites on Good Friday to represent Christ’s ascension to heaven.

In Spain, some Christians don cloaks and pointed hoods to participate in eerie night-time processions. The parades are organized by local religious brotherhoods. The participants -- called penitents, or sinners -- carry crucifixes and religious icons through the streets to act out the Easter story. According to centuries-old tradition, the penitents wear capirotes, or tall pointed hats, so that their neighbors don't know the identity of the sinner behind the mask.

Confronting the End of Meaning: Crucifixion and the Critique of Signs and Wonders

Francisco de Zurbaran , Agnus Dei , 1636 - 40 , San Diego Museum of Art , California , USA

3 Reasons the Human Jesus is Important

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2015/03/3-reasons-human-jesus-is-important/

by Peter Enns

March 31, 2015

Comments

Guest Blogger Jared Byas

This week Christians celebrate the crazy idea that God became human.

While affirming this in theory, my evangelical upbringing was very uncomfortable with the idea of  a Human Jesus. We had to admit Jesus was human but that didn’t mean we had to like it.

After all, the God Jesus is where the magic happens. Human Jesus sometimes muddles the important stuff, takes our eyes off the ball about heaven and whatnot. But here, I submit 3 reasons why Human Jesus is important to remember:

1. God gets that we are a mess.

Jesus experienced the love of his mother and the betrayal of his best friends. He felt the beautiful sensuality of getting his feet wiped with the hair of a young woman and the tortuous pain of getting his feet nailed to a cross.

In seminary it was through seeing Jesus as unapologetically human that I was able to see that God doesn’t want me to become superhuman but wants me to be a loved person.

Christianity isn’t an instruction manual for how to be perfect like God but a story about how God became like us. And that’s a crucial difference.

2. God is willing to join the mess.

God doesn’t mind “looking bad” for the sake of those God loves.

If you want to be in relationship with broken humans, you run the risk of looking broken yourself. God doesn’t seem to care. Why do we?

The streak I see in Human Jesus is the holy being so involved in the lives of the unholy that people are uncomfortable with how, from the outside, it’s hard to tell the difference. I see a God who, for the sake of love would risk reputation, trading in “omnipotent” for “glutton” and “drunk.”

3. Because of #1 & #2, I expect a very human-looking Bible.

If the same God that came to earth as an unimpressive carpenter from an underperforming people group also provided us a book, I would expect it to look very human. Would it run the risk of looking ordinary, unrefined, and altogether human?

Yes. Point taken. The Bible looks a lot like Jesus.

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Confronting the End of Meaning:

Crucifixion and the Critique of Signs and Wonders

http://peterrollins.net/2015/03/confronting-the-end-of-meaning-crucifixion-and-the-critique-of-signs-and-wonders/

by Peter Rollins

March 03, 2015

Last night Tony Jones had a launch for his latest book Did God Kill Jesus. The book itself is an excellent and very readable overview of the various ways that the church has understood the meaning and significance of the Crucifixion. Partly motivated by Trip Fuller’s statement, “God has to be at least as nice as Jesus,” he goes further than simply describing the basic approaches and endeavours to find a way of understanding the Crucifixion that prevents it [from] being mired in a theology that justifies violence, anti-Semitism, exclusion, and political oppression.

In the book Jones views the incarnation as signifying a fundamental shift in the way God relates to human beings (shifting God from a place of sympathy regarding humans to empathy). The infinite lives into the finite and tastes the existential predicament of human subjectivity. Including condemnation by the law, oppression and a sense of alienation (Crucifixion).

The main problem I have with this approach is that Tony continues to see the Crucifixion as a meaningful event. It is an event that must be integrated into a certain apologetic system. An approach that generates so many of the problems that Tony brings up in the book… how to make an event that seems to defy everything we think of the Absolute, fit with it.

Below I have taken an excerpt from The Divine Magician that outlines a critique of this idea. It begins by referencing a previous argument concerning “freedom from the sacred-object” and closes before I go on to draw the consequences of the position I outline. Both of which are important to the position. But I hope it at least introduces the idea that Crucifixion might operate as a rupture in meaning.

This freedom from the sacred-object also spells freedom from the need to find an overarching meaning to life. Indeed, the apostle Paul directly attacks the idea of Christianity offering a system of meaning in his attacks on what he called “signs” and “wisdom.” Signs and wisdom represent two ways in which we seek meaning. Through either apologetic argument or the occurrence of unusual or unexplainable events, we want to find ways to justify our beliefs.

To the Jew a "Stumbling Block"

While the affirmation of signs and wisdom to justify a particular religious position is part-and-parcel of religious discourse, Paul sets his sights firmly against them when critiquing the Jewish community of his day for seeking the former and the Greeks for wanting the latter,

Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom,but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

What’s fascinating here is the way Paul sets up the Crucifixion as the very opposite of a sign or wisdom. From the perspective of both, the Crucifixion can strike one as nothing but empty nonsense. Why? Because this method of execution symbolized a divine curse. More than this, the idea of an innocent man, let alone God, being murdered in such horrific terms strikes against the idea of justice, reason, or goodness.

It is a meaningless, absurd, and offensive event, something theologian Paul Hessert picks up in his book Christ and the End of Meaning,

Anyone executed by hanging was seen in Jewish tradition as cursed by God. The sign of such a death was taken as divine corroboration of the administration of human justice. In other words, God was seen as acting in this sign-event to give the victim “what was coming to him.”

As that which runs against the very idea of a sign, Hessert argues that what we’re confronted with is a type of profound offense to reason:

The affront is not merely the case of the ignominious, brutal death of Jesus . . . [it is] to the whole religious outlook that searches for signs. . . . Preaching “Christ crucified” is not merely saying that bad things happen to good people but that God’s approach to us belies our expectations.

In other words, the event of the Crucifixion is actually the very contradiction of our expectations. This contradiction is much more than the liberal concept that the cross represents the idea of a good person being killed because he stood up against injustice. It is rather a direct confrontation of all that we think religion and God is about—it is that which breaks apart “our sense of reality.”

To Greek Stoicism "foolishness"

In the scripture passage quoted previously, Paul connects the desire for wisdom with the Greeks and their development of classical philosophy (the “love of wisdom”). The Greeks were not so much interested in signs, but rather with the eternal realm of ideas. They sought an underlying rational structure that would make sense of the passing, decaying nature of the world and render it all meaningful.

The preeminent teachers of wisdom at the time of Jesus were the Stoics. Stoicism was the ancient Hellenistic philosophy that emphasized an emotionally balanced life based upon a will that was in accord to nature, a strong moral temperament, and a deeply rational outlook.

These teachers would often compete with Christian preachers for an audience and argued that behind the chaos of our lived experience there was a harmonious center, an order that could, in principle, provide a meaning for everything. The Stoics saw the brokenness and decay of the world as a type of illusion or temporary condition. While they had a strong moral theory, there was a broad acceptance of the status quo. In this way, Stoicism was able to become the philosophical outlook of the cultural elite in the Roman Empire without actually threatening some of the more barbaric and inequitable practices of the day.

The Stoics would have had little problem in accepting the liberal reading of Christ’s crucifixion as an example of one who faced injustice and suffering with [a kind of Stoic] peace and resoluteness. Indeed this Jesus would have fitted very neatly into their worldview.

For Paul, however, there was something much more profound and offensive taking place in the idea of “Christ crucified.” Indeed, Paul was reading the Crucifixion against this stoic vision of Jesus. For Paul, the Crucifixion was that which defied reduction to a sign or system of meaning. As Hessert notes,

“Christ crucified” makes no sense. Instead of linking God to the enveloping rationality that absorbs or even overrides the passing contradictions of goodness, it focuses attention on the contradiction itself. That is, “Christ crucified” is no key to the meaning of life and human events. It is a problem to meaning, a problem requiring explanation.

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Shoah

noun

1. (in secular Judaism) a Hebrew word for holocaust (sense 2) See alsoChurban (sense 2)

Word Origin literally: destruction

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Holocaust

[hol-uh-kawst, hoh-luh-]

noun

1. a great or complete devastation or destruction, especially by fire.

2. a sacrifice completely consumed by fire; burnt offering.

3. the systematic mass slaughter of European Jews in Nazi concentration camps during World War II

4. any mass slaughter or reckless destruction of life.

---

Hessert notes that the Shoah operates in a similar way within Jewish thought. For the Shoah is that horrific, unspeakable event that ruptures and renders offensive any attempt to make it into a divine sign or element of wider rationality. This is why the term Shoah is often preferred over Holocaust. For the latter is derived from the Greek holókauston, a term that has connections with the notion of religious sacrifice and thus religious significance. In contrast, the Shoah simply means destruction and thus lacks any justificatory undertones.

The attempt to provide a cosmic meaning for the Shoah is not simply misplaced, it is a profound offense. The event stands as an affront to all such strategies. In terms of the European intellectual tradition, the First World War can be seen to act in a similar way. One of the features of this horrific event is found in the way that the war disrupted all our attempts to tie it into some deeper meaning or significance.

It is precisely this connection with meaning, religious or otherwise, that the Crucifixion of Christ cuts against.

Once we grasp this idea of Christ representing a break with [Jewish] signs and [Greek] wisdom, we can begin to perceive how the actual existing church has fundamentally betrayed the scandal of the Crucifixion, effectively making it into a type of Stoic doctrine that doesn’t challenge our world, but confirms it.

In contrast, for Paul, “Christ crucified” is that event that defies all attempts at being reduced to some system of meaning.

It is a type of antisign that fractures religious signs.

An antiwisdom that confounds human wisdom.

A nuclear event that blows apart all of our apologetic enclosures.

Paul and the Crucifixion: Neither Modern Nor Postmodern in Radical Theology

I have been participating in the "Rupture, Revelation, Revolution" classes each week and must share what Badiou's "Event and Being" means to me on a rudimentary level. I say "rudimentary" because I am not a philosopher but am interested in the creation of a new postmodern philosophical language (or linguistic scaffolding structure) in which to inspect and/or construct/deconstruct a new postmodern language for present day theology. 

Moreover, last summer I met and studied under Alain Badiou at the insistence of a new friend who was conducting podcasts with Pete Rollins and John Caputo out of my office from the week before. And well that I did, because Badiou was the kind of free-ranging thinker whose system concepts bode a greater expansiveness to my own enlightenment/modernistic background from which I had been attempting a resurrection from through the utilization of postmodern thought.

Anyway, today's blog article is a crude summary of what we have been talking about the past 2 weeks which I hope helps when reading Pete Rollins article following immediately below.

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"I have been taking a 6 week primer on philosophic radical theology using Paul's theology as a type of profound revelation that ruptures one's previous world systems by displacing and deeply revolutionizing all succeeding thoughts and acts against past cherished paradigms personally or sociological ingrained in society.

By using Alain Badiou's "Event and Being" as a juxtaposition we moved last week from the poet/prophet act of receiving (or discerning) revelation (the Event) to this week's transformative stages of Being which becomes radically transformative in the Christ event for the Apostle Paul (even as it is for the Christian believer).

As such, all past hermeneutics interpreting Jesus must radically fall away for Paul as he became consumed in Jesus as a rupturing Event to his life's theology, mission, and identity. Similarly, post-modernism's anthropological-existential hermeneutics may now displace all previous enlightenment and modernistic theologies themselves having become radically transformed upon the very foundation these systems had built for their own demise.

In lay terms this means that even as Paul was profoundly changed by Jesus in doctrine, service, and identity so will the new postmodern Christian become profoundly moved fundamentally to his/her state of being with its acquisitions and proclivities. And as individuals are changed so will the church in its doctrine, mission, and identity.

Thus, Paul no longer sought to fit Jesus into his bible but the bible around Jesus. (In existential terms Paul was the one to be fit around Jesus even as the Christian believer becomes radically transformed in the same way). He knew the reality of his experience (the subjective response to the objective) and though he could not explain it he knew he must become neither Jew nor Greek but God's servant.

Even so, this is the philosophical scaffolding of a new theology that brings God's kingdom into the present through gracious acts of servitude towards others when overwhelmed by Spirit-filled revelatory light and illumination. A new consciousness which sees world systems and Jewish or Christian laws as antithetical to Jesus' apocalyptic event and being.

Correspondingly, this becomes the scary stuff that we most fear because it radically changes us should we allow it to do so. But without this personal admittance it cannot displace nor disrupt nor revolutionize the very person seeking to be claimed by the event itself.

Likewise must theology flow in its disruption to all past theologies that it might proclaim the event through a new essence of being. An essence which deconstructs old-line systems and traditions in order to reconstruct the self to the newer radicalized rectitudes and discontinuities obtained by the rupturing revelation to consumptive lives, routines, and activities.

R.E. Slater

March 31, 2015

Comments

Anon: "I concur with all of this. I hope you'll keep us/me updated as you move through the course. Sounds interesting and wise.+

Myself: "Thanks. It's even more radical than this. I am looking for a new philosophical framework on which theology might further expand and transform the bible beyond perspectival hermeneutics to radically lived kingdom lives. Lives as very poets and prophets themselves. I met Badiou and studied with him last summer but even though I didn't understand it I felt there was in his way of thinking a way to reinterpret the bible beyond itself. Moreover, it's also a continuation of reviewing what radical theology can become stripped of western thinking and infused in Christ. Basically it's left of liberalism but center on with Jesus at its core."

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Paul and the Crucifixion: Neither Modern, Nor Postmodern

http://peterrollins.net/2015/03/paul-and-the-crucifixion-neither-modern-nor-postmodern/

by Peter Rollins

March 03, 2015

As some of you know, I’m currently teaching a course with Tripp Fuller that explores the turn to Paul found among atheist philosophers. In contrast to the “New Perspective on Paul” found in contemporary theology, people like Badiou, Zizek and Taubes are celebrating a militant, political Paul who provides a model for combating postmodernism.

One of the questions that has come up during the course concerns why on earth these political atheist thinkers would find an ally in Paul when they share nothing of his dogma or commitment to the largely conservative, pietistic community that claims his legacy. More than this, the Resurrection of Christ is Paul’s overriding belief, it is the sun around which everything else orbits.

How then can thinkers who view this part of the Jesus story as a fable, possibly champion the controversial apostle?

In order to approach an answer we have to briefly reflect on how Paul held the belief in Christ’s resurrection. Bearing in mind the centrality of the belief, it is hard not to be struck by the fact that he doesn’t actually argue for it in the traditional way. Indeed he specifically claimed that the event was foolishness in terms of reason, and a stumbling block for those who sought a sign. In this way Paul neither resembles the modern apologist who employs philosophy to back up his claims, nor the postmodernist who sees her claims as relative.

Paul can’t be placed into either of these camps, and instead opens up a different mode of discourse: Proclamation. For Badiou, this opens up the figure of the apostle over-and-against the figure of the philosopher and the prophet.

To understand the atheist philosophers’ enlisting of Paul we have to understand the nature of this third discourse in relation to the statement “Christ is Risen.” The main thing that strikes us when reading Paul’s claim is the way that it isn’t a theory to defend, it is rather an event that is proclaimed and verified in the formation of what Paul Tillich would call, the New Being.

In Badiou’s excellent book on Paul he uses the example of how the belief in the gas chambers used by the Nazis function for us today.

The claim that millions of Jews where executed in these gas chambers is an historical one that is open to verification and falsification. However the way that this claim functions for us cannot be reduced to this level. When someone attempts to draw us into a debate about whether or not these murders really happened, we not only refuse to enter in, we expose how the very reduction of the event to a type of detached historical debate is already a betrayal of the event it signals.

For most of the world the historical belief in the mass murder of Jews in Nazi death camps articulates an event that demands an unconditional stance. The historical record is encountered as something that makes an absolute claim on us. It reflects a horror that we must attempt to ensure never happens again. The contingent historical reality is thus a site of demand. It houses an event that cannot be reduced to the location it was birthed in. An event that is eclipsed the moment we treat the gas Chambers in a cold, detached way.

For Paul, the resurrection is a historical reality, but he holds it like one might hold the belief in the gas chambers, i.e. the event housed in the historical claim is not something one debates, holds lightly or defends. For Paul it is proclaimed in the life of the one caught up in the event. For Paul, the idea of playing into the Greek discourse of reason is not simply misplaced, but a fundamental betrayal of the event. In a brilliant reflection from St. Paul, Badiou shows that even Pascal failed to grasp this in its entirety.

This is analogous to the event of love. A contingent, imperfect other becomes, for us, the site for the love-event. The love-event is birthed from the other, but the lover doesn’t engage in apologetics to defend their claim that their beloved is the most beautiful person in the world. Yet neither are they an apathetic relativist about their beloved. That contingent person who they met through a random set of events becomes the site for that which cannot be reduced to a mere philosophical argument. [cf., Something I explore here.]

To grasp this means that one can begin to see why some radical political philosophers are drawn to Paul. For Paul is a clear example of a militant who is committed to a truth-event, a truth-event that is based in the world but that is not reducible to it.

This is powerfully portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. In one particularly incredible scene the firebrand apostle is preaching the resurrected Christ when Jesus confronts him and calls him a liar. When Paul pursues him Jesus says, “I was never crucified, I never rose from the dead. I’m a man like everyone else.” In response to this news Paul retorts, “I don’t care if you’re Jesus or not. The resurrected Jesus is what will save the world and that’s what matters.”

In this scene Paul is faced with the reality that the historical claim that birthed his vision of a universal community (of neither Jew nor Gentile), is false. But rather than despair he thanks Jesus. For he knows that the event is what counts. The historical claim opened up the way for the event, but the event is what counts.

In the same way, a person transformed by love, but who later finds out that their lover was a scoundrel and a fraud, can still be faithful to the transformed life that arose from the love. [sic, not that Jesus was either rogue or scondrel]

For Paul there is probably as little doubt about a historical resurrection than there is doubt for us about the gas chambers in Nazi Germany. But the resuscitation of a body is not what Paul is concerned about: he proclaims Resurrection (with a capital “R”). This means that he proclaims New Being.

Whether one thinks that the historical site of the event is actual or not, one can be caught up in the event and committed to fighting for the universal community that is opened up by the event.

So then, for people like Badiou, Paul provides a great ancient example of what we so need today, a figure committed to fighting for a universal community. A figure who doesn’t get bogged down in modernist apologetics or in postmodern relativism.

jesus meet saint paul ----from temptation

* * * * * * * * * *

Philosopher's on Paul

http://homebrewedchristianity.com/2015/03/10/philosophers-on-paul/

by Tripp Fuller

March 10, 2015

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Why in the world are philosophers getting so excited about Paul these days?

Well I would tell you the answer but Tripp and Pete decided to do an entire High Gravity class investigating this turn to Paul among political philosophers. Last week the class kicked off with an initial session on the Bible with Daniel Kirk and now in the second session we turn to the philosophers. This podcast includes the general introduction to Paul and the philosophers that kicked off session two. Check it out and think about joining us for the rest of the class.

In the second half of this session we discussed Jacob Taubes‘ seminal work The Political Theology of Paul. His lectures were what paved the way for two of the most talked about texts in political philosophy. In weeks 3 and 4 we will walk through Alain Badiou‘s Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. In weeks 5 and 6 we will do a close reading of Slavoj Zizek‘s The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity.

The class includes over 10 hours of live-streamed nerdiness for just 30 bucks. Each session will be a live streamed video-cast w/ some introductory remarks about the thinkers, conversational walk-through the texts, and interaction with the participants. Following the session it will be available for download on the class page along with links to the archived video, supplemental reading material, and the class discussion board. Each session will begin at 6pm pst (9pm est). Go HERE to join.

Make sure you check out our sponsor Deidox Films. They create short films takes which show how different disciples in different walks of life embody their faith. If you like using films in your teaching, preaching or learning then get wise and click on over.

You can also check out the downloadable package of three High Gravity classes Tripp and Peter Rollins taught together. It includes all the audio from Atheism for Lent, Radical Theology, and Christology classes totally over 27 hours of material for 50 bucks.

Head over HERE for info about the March 17th Theology Nerd Bootcamp in Chicago before #PYM15.

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Remembering an All-But-Forgotten, Extremely Influential Theologian: Christoph Blumhardt

Remembering an All-But-Forgotten, Extremely

Influential Theologian: Christoph Blumhardt

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by Roger Olson

March 29, 2015

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Much to their credit, a few historical theologians are trying to revive memory of German theologian-evangelist Christoph Blumhardt. My friend and co-author Christian Collins Winn (Bethel College, MN) is one of them. (He and I collaborated on our recently published book Reclaiming Pietism: Retrieving an Evangelical Tradition [Eerdmans, 2015].) In my opinion, however, Blumhardt is one of those great Christian thinkers and leaders who has been pushed to the deep background and only remembered (vaguely) by some as an influence on Karl Barth’s theology. However, even some books about Barth and his theology neglect to mention Blumhardt who deserves much more credit for helping launch theological renewal in the twentieth century.

Christoph (1842-1919) would consider it a disservice to himself not to mention his father Johann (1805-1880). The father was catapulted to fame in Germany and the Christian world by the story of his months-long exorcism of a demonic spirit possessing a young woman. Johann was a fairly ordinary Lutheran pastor in Southwestern Germany when she was brought to him by a friend. He did not consider himself an exorcist and had hardly given a thought to the subject of demon-possession but discerned that this young woman’s problem was supernatural. He was reluctant to engage in exorcism but agreed to pray for her. Eventually the demonic spirit left her and she was miraculously freed from spiritual bondage to evil. The elder Blumhardt went on to found a Christian retreat center for spiritual counseling, prayer and healing that became famous not only in Germany but also in Great Britain and America.

Christoph grew up in that atmosphere under the influence of his famous father and eventually took over his father’s ministry moving the retreat center to Bad Boll. It still exists although much changed. Now it is an ecumenical center for peace studies.

Christoph Blumhardt was a phenomenon in his own lifetime, much revered and criticized. He refused to fit into any traditional religious category and eventually surrendered his ministerial credentials in the state church under tremendous pressure from the tradition-bound hierarchy. Christoph was, like his father, a renowned exorcist and “faith healer.” (I prefer the term “divine healing evangelist” because in that tradition it is God who heals, not the person who prays. “Faith healing” is a journalistic term that does not do justice to that tradition’s beliefs.) People came from all over the world to Bad Boll to meet Blumhardt, hear him preach, receive spiritual counseling and advice from him and to be prayed for. He was widely regarded especially in Germany as a prophet, evangelist and political activist.

Blumhardt (from here on when I use that name I mean Christoph) picked up his personal motto from his father: “Jesus is victor!” This was the prophetic phrase declared by a woman present at the end of the famous exorcism carried out by his father over months. Blumhardt believed and taught that the future Kingdom of God is breaking into history through Jesus and the church. He believed and taught that miracles ought to be expected signs of this presence of the future. But he also believed socialism is the social order of the Kingdom of God and that Christians ought to model socialism in the church and state. He joined the Socialist party and became a member of parliament for a few years. He was also a universalist and pacifist. He believed that “Jesus is victor!” also means that God’s coming Kingdom through Jesus will eventually be all inclusive.

Barth gave Blumhardt credit for influencing his theology and social views. But Barth was not alone in being strongly influenced by Blumhardt. Scholars writing about Jürgen Moltmann almost always refer to two major influences on his thought—Barth and Bloch (Ernst). However, Moltmann himself credits Blumhardt with being the single most influential person on the development and direction of his theology. (See “The Hope for the Kingdom of God and Signs of Hope in the World: The Relevance of Blumhardt’s Theology Today” in Pneuma 26/1 (Spring, 2004). Donald G. Bloesch used Blumhardt’s motto “Jesus is Lord!” as the title of his little book on Barth’s theology and referred to Blumhardt many times in his writings.

My long time readers will already know how influenced I am by theologian Emil Brunner on whose Dogmatics I cut my “theological teeth” in seminary. Brunner dedicated Volume 3 of Dogmatics (The Christian Doctrine of the Church, Faith, and the Consummation) to Blumhardt: “This book is dedicated to Christoph Blumhardt. It was he, the prophetic witness to Jesus, who in the days of my youth by direct personal contact and, later, through men like Kutter and Ragaz, rooted me deep in the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit. I have always loved and honoured him as one of those in whom the divine light shone forth, and in gratitude I regard my theological work as the harvest of his sowing.”

What did Barth, Bloesch, Brunner and Moltmann have in common that they might have inherited from Blumhardt? The answer is obvious: their Christological concentration. But it is better expressed as their “concentration on Jesus.” Some people talk endlessly about “Christ” but rarely mention “Jesus.” The difference may seem subtle, but it’s not to a true Pietist. One can believe in and talk about “Christ” as (for example) “the New Being that appeared in Jesus” while pushing the living Jesus, our contemporary (as Kierkegaard put it), to the background. Blumhardt believed Jesus is alive and busy wherever God’s people invite and allow him to be busy—bringing in the Kingdom on earth among us. Barth, Bloesch, Brunner and Moltmann all developed Christocentric or “Jesus-centered” theologies that, like Blumhardt’s theology, were infused with Pietism without Quietism. (Yes, I know Barth was highly critical of Pietism, but I am convinced his critiques of Pietism were aimed at a particular German expression of Pietism in his time and place and not at Pietism in general. He was very appreciative of Zinzendorf, for example, calling him a modern father of the church.)

All four of those theologians drew from Blumhardt their Jesus-centered hermeneutic of Scripture that relativized the Bible as witness to revelation with “revelation” being Jesus. Brunner’s “I-Thou encounter” is usually traced back (as a concept) to Martin Buber and Ferdinand Ebner, but I recognize it as just as much or more influenced by Blumhardt. When I first encountered Brunner in seminary I detected a certain “spirit” or “ethos” that resonated with my Pentecostal-Pietist spiritual formation. I now realize that ingredient in Brunner’s theology was Blumhardt in him.

We need a rediscovery of Blumhardt in contemporary theology.

Notes to Water Based Green Infrastructure: Sustainability and Practices

"It's amazing what happens below our feet and all around us."

- anon

Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling,

for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake 

of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted.

Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now.

- Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir [excerpt]

Geese appear high over us,

pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

- Wendell Berry, What We Need Is Here

When despair grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting for their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

- Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things

* * * * * * * * * *

Water Based Green Infrastructure:

Sustainability and Practices

Why Natural Hydrology?

Healthy natural landscapes slows rainfall down, cools it, and filters it back into the ecosystem.

The purposes of water is used as energy to living ecosystems by carrying nutrients to the landscape as a balancing mechanism to living things. This occurs in two ways:

1 - Cycles of Depletion and Renewal

2 - Ground Water Flow Paths: Infiltration of the water into the land as it flows into the water table and back to land surfaces recharging the ground

But Urbanscapes have altered the natural conditions of water hydrology through several mechanisms:

• gray infrastructure - ex: cement
• stormwater management - ex: pavement
• volume redirection - discharge
• detention basins
• restriction of distribution of natural deposits and nutrients 
• outflow to streams and away from the land

Results Occur as:

• flooding
• air and water decline
• environmental impact and decline
• decaying roads
• rising maintenance costs
• loss of recreating social and community well-being

As a result we now have a crumbling gray infrastructure needing repair and maintenance. However, we also have the opportunity to replace, rebuild, replenish, and remodel living human communities back into synchronisation with the natural ecological cycles of the land.

Water Balancing Strategies

• Treat water as a resource
• Keep water local
• Replicate natural hydrology by understanding it
• Replicate natural hydrology by recreating it
• Replicate natural hydrology by lessening the impact of urbanscaping

How?

• By reducing runoff
• By restoring infiltration to the maximum of biodiversity
• By connecting people to water and to living things (biophelia)

*biophelia = a love of live and the living world; the affinity of human beings to be in productive relations with other human beings and nature itself.

What are our water consumption and waste options? To treat and re-use waste water onsite. This will reduce infrastructure and containment transportation.

Types of  Water Consumption and Waste Recycling Options:

• Green Roofs which protect and cool building while providing sociological re-creation

• Permeable Pavements to allow the water to be reabsorbed into the ground and travel as groundwaterthrough its various cycles of replenishment and nourishment

• Creation of Bio-Retention ponds and drainage systems as healing gardens

• Rainwater Harvesting and Re-Use

• Waste Water Recycling and Re-Use

Types of Problems?

• Cold weather challenges to porous pavements
• Community promotion and marketing of green/blue infrastructure
• Create tool sets to monitor sustainability targets

Tool Sets for Sustainability Targets

Sustainable Site Initiatives for Land Design and Development:

• USGVC LEED Programs
• Ecosystems Services
• Human Health and Well-Being
• Natural Biophelia Re-scaping of Land
• Living Building Challenges (this has a higher rating system than the LEED standards)

Types of High Performance Green Buildings:

• LEED - Gold certification
• LEED - Platinum certification

Using rainwater redirection as a functional and artful component of the building or campus' landscape by opening up covering drainage pipes to the air and sun as a form of rain-scaping or rainwater gardens. Thus, re-shaping through artful re-creation water courses through rainwater harvesting and bioscaping to living landscapes.

Reasons for Geothermal Heating and Cooling:

• To Obtain Energy Use Efficiencies
• To Decrease of Greenhouse Gas Emissions
• To Decrease Water Use (saves $$)

District Applications and Site Types

• Green Streets Re-creation and Integration through visioning workshops to revitalize gray-scapes through sustainability projects.

• Education and encouragement of the the community to become a transformative part of the process of terra-forming.

• Integrating human use with a pedestrian focus into the project: walking, bicyclists, accessibility to the handicapped, etc.

• Forming a participatory community process for community life strategies.

• By soliciting artful natural landscaping from the public.

• By maximizing public spaces for public usage within natural landscaping.

for further reading ~

Index - EarthCare and Ecology