Apophasis: Just the thing for beefy, well-fed liberals
Image courtesy of Jesus and Mo As I was poking about for images related to negative theology, I found this comic attached to a post at Why Evolution is True, biologist Jerry Coyne‘s blog. In said post, Coyne ridicules negative (apophatic) theology while avoiding saying what’s actually wrong with it. But the strip is pretty [...]
On sex and negative theology
Daniel Bonnell, Adam and Eve, 2011. Black crayon on grocery bag paper. See more of Bonnell’s works here. Used with permission of the artist Back in my physics grad school days I hung out with a lot of people who were students at the University’s divinity school. And several times, just for grins, I would [...]
On Christian atheism and (reverent) deconstruction
Oxymoron, by Camera Freak. By all accounts this guy in Hyde Park (London) is quite persistent. This picture was taken in 1998 and he was still at it in 2007. He may be there today. Apparently he sets up in a prominent location; have any Alert Readers ever seen him? Photo credit: Peter Gordon In [...]
So this guy eats some plums
The guy who ate the plums: William Carlos Williams‘s 1921 passport photo. Image source: Wikimedia Commons Look here to read William Carlos Williams’s poem This is Just to Say. Williams, the selfsame fellow who brought us the white chickens beside the red wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater, published this piece in 1934. What is it about? [...]
Idols and icons
Theophanes the Greek, icon of the Transfiguration (1408). When Jesus was transfigured, Peter wanted to take the moment and hold onto it by building dwellings on the mountaintop. But Jesus, who knew the difference between idols and icons, said no. Image source: Wikimedia Commons Paula Kirby used to be a Christian but now she’s not. [...]
Door by door
Doorway in Galileo’s villa. I took this photo in 2003 when I visited Arcetri, a small Italian village just to the south of Florence. This is the interior of the house in which Galileo lived under house arrest from 1633 until he died in 1643. If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art [...]
The absence
Edward Hopper, Sun in an Empty Room (1963). Image source: archi-ethan.blogspot.com The Absence It is this great absence that is like a presence, that compels me to address it without hope of a reply. It is a room I enter from which someone has just gone, the vestibule for the arrival of one who has [...]
Negative theology and the foolishness of progressive postmodern Christians
The Tetragrammaton in Paleo-Hebrew, which today is often written YHWH or Yahweh. Its origin is thought by many to be Exodus 3, in which Moses is instructed to tell the people that “I Am” sent him. In Christian scripture it is translated “The Lord,” written in small caps. Observant Jews write but do not speak [...]
XI. Thou shalt not speak before thinking
Fra Angelico, Peter Martyr Enjoins Silence, c.1441. Peter Martyr, known also as St. Peter of Verona, was an Italian Dominican friar whose preaching was responsible for returning many heretics, most notably Cathari, to orthodoxy. Catharism was a religious movement with dualist tendencies; that is, it held that there was a God of Good and a [...]
On prayer: Simone Weil and the excluded God
Simone Weil‘s 1935 factory identification photo. In that year she began working as a power press operator at the Alstom Company in Paris. She was highly educated and had many options but chose to work alongside those who had no power. She later wrote, “A modern factory reaches perhaps almost the limit of horror. Everybody [...]
