Postgereformeerd

Vandaag weer een aflevering in de serie over Dan Siedells Boek. Dit keer van Bruce Ellis Benson

Recently, a colleague from the English department at Wheaton made the point in conversation that a novel has a way of getting at the reality of ethical life in a way that philosophy generally cannot. In watching a character forced to make difficult ethical decisions—with all their varied gradations of “good” and “bad,” not to mention conflicting demands—one gets a much more profound sense of the complexity of trying to live virtuously than a philosophical theory can provide. One can, to be sure, cite a text like Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death as providing a particularly nuanced moral account. But, as if to prove my colleague’s point, Derrida needs the story of Abraham and Isaac precisely in order to tease out those complications.

In effect, Dan Siedell employs Enrique Martínez Celaya’s painting Thing and Deception to complexify such assumed binaries of belief and unbelief (as well as such opposites as banal and profound, truth and superstition—though here I will focus on belief and its supposed antonyms of unbelief or doubt).

Lees hier verder.

Vandaag weer een weergave van het churchandpomo blog over Dan Siedell’s boek:

The fact that I have no authority to make grand pronouncements will not keep me from doing so: God in the Gallery is the starting point for the future of the Christianity and art conversation, at least (or especially) in the North American evangelical, not to mention post-evangelical, milieu. I am consequently grateful to participate in this forum which, following James’ opening remarks on the importance of informed engagement, now proceeds to the topic of “modern” art, which I understand to be distinguishable from postmodern or contemporary art (beginning c. 1960), a topic which Siedell addresses in later chapters.

An analogy to describe Siedell’s aim in this chapter can be found in the task of historians, such as Edward Grant, who seeks to show the undeniable, but normatively ignored, Christian backdrop of modern science. But while there are many scholars at work correcting the doggedly secularized narrative of science, there are far fewer, if any, doing the same for the history of art, let alone the history of modern art. Siedell seeks to fill this lacuna, describing his agenda as follows: “A history of modern art can be written that reveals that Christianity in all its myriad cultural and material manifestations is never absent from the modern artist.”

Lees hier verder.

Mijn relatie met Carl Raschke is een beetje vreemd, we verschillen een volle generatie, leven aan verschillende kanten van de oceaan en hij heeft echt verstand van filosofie en ikke niet. En toch is het altijd goed als we elkaar ontmoeten. We hebben plezier, steken door naar het persoonlijke en leren van elkaar (ik meer van hem dan hij van mij) over filosofie, gerechtigheid en kunst.

Hier weer zo’n leermoment(voor mij):

Deconstruction and the Force of Language

Ever since I finished with my graduate seminar on Derrida this past spring I’ve been looking quite differently at what was always at stake in “post-structuralism” – what years ago we called postmodernism in philosophy before the latter word took hold.  The term “postmodernism” gained currency after Lyotard publishedThe Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge in the mid-1980s.. In this particular seminar I had some of the best and the brightest, and a few of them in their innocent enthusiasm for exploring the giddy vastness of “Derrida-world” called my attention to some important misuses of the evolving Derridean canon that became necessary in their own right to deconstruct.

What my students showed me toward the end of the term is that we have misappropriated the fashion of “deconstructively” reading texts as some new kind of critical theory, which we regularly, and sometimes ruthlessly, apply to structures of meaning and authority as well as forms  of organization.  That would of course include the church, and the ongoing effort to “deconstruct” Christianity, or “churchianity”, is one of the things I have in mind.

Lees hier verder.

Zojuist heb ik mijn eerste bijdrage gezet op het church and postmodern culture blog:

While I am writing this text my commuter train travels through Delftland; a tiny patch of green grass and cows compressed by surrounding cities of Den Hague, Rotterdam and 3 highways. Around me I hear at least five different languages and see seven different ethnicities. Headscarves and cleavage discuss both math tests and the latest boyfriends while my train passes a beautifull mosque next to a huge soccerstadion: Welcome to my home; The Netherlands.

Lees hier verder.