Wikio - Top Blogs - Religion and belief

Saturday 30 January 2016

Becoming the Other: Art as Empathy

This year's Glen Workshop organised by Image Journal has a great theme; Becoming the Other: Art as Empathy. This theme will provide a focal point for discussion throughout the week.

The folk at Image explain their theme like this ...

"Though the human race is one family, we have seldom lived as if that were true. Our ancient texts often address the cultural, racial, and geopolitical distinctions that fragment us into groups, real and imagined. When we meet an Other, someone who represents a difference, we call them stranger. While we can respond with hospitality, more often we feel uncertainty, envy, and fear.

Yet for as long as conflict has torn the human family, art has allowed us to see similarity within difference, offering a mode of reconciliation. The scriptures are clear: we are to welcome Others, treating them as we wish to be treated.

During the week we’ll explore this and other questions together: Can the arts allow us to imagine more deeply the lives of those who seem unlike us, and so move us to greater compassion, connection, and acts of justice? How can art make us more humble, reveal our own prejudices, and destabilize our tidy categories? In short, how can fostering the imagination engender true empathy?"

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Over The Rhine - All My Favourite People.

No comments: