Spirit of the living God, apart from You, we can do nothing.
Transform Your Church into the image of Jesus Christ.
Release Your power to bring healing to the sick,
freedom to the oppressed and comfort to those who mourn.
Pour Your love into our hearts and fill us with compassion
to answer the call of the homeless and the hungry
and to enfold orphans, widows and the elderly in Your care.
Give us wisdom and insight for the complex problems we face today.
Help us to use the resources of the earth for the well-being of all.
Holy Spirit, we need Your comfort and guidance.
Transform our hearts. Amen.
Christians across the UK have taken part in the Global Day of Prayer (GDOP) movement since it started by joining 220 Nations and 100’s of millions of Christians in prayer on Pentecost Sunday. Last year over 50 events took place across all 33 London boroughs and some of the Home Counties. In 2011 GDOP London is encouraging as many groups, churches, organisations and ministries as possible to participate in the Global Day of Prayer today by praying the Lord’s Prayer and Prayers for the World, of which the prayer above is a part.
Why prayer and why Pentecost Sunday? The belief is that, as 2 Chronicles 7: 14 states, “If My people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” That was the experience of the disciples on the first Day of Pentecost as they were filled with he Holy Spirit’s power and began to be witnesses for Jesus throughout the world.
Jesus promised, as we have heard in John 7. 27-39, stream of life-giving water will pour out from within anyone who believes in him. The writer of John’s Gospel says that when Jesus said this he was speaking about the Holy Spirit, which those who believed in him were going to receive. Jesus, himself, is the life-giving water which, through the work of the Holy Spirit, will flow out from within those who believe in Jesus.
Therefore, we pray for this to be our experience too. We pray, Spirit of the living God, transform us into the image of Jesus Christ. Release your power, pour your love into our hearts and fill us with compassion. Give us wisdom and insight, comfort and guidance. Transform our hearts.
But not for ourselves alone. We pray to be transformed so that in turn our world can be transformed and our land healed. That healing will be brought to the sick, freedom to the oppressed, comfort to those who mourn. That the call of the homeless and the hungry will be answered, orphans, widows and the elderly enfolded in God’ care, and the resources of the earth used for the well-being of all. That the Kingdom of God will come on earth, as in heaven.
This is what Pentecost means. This is what the coming of the Holy Spirit can achieve. On the day of Pentecost, the Jews gave thanks for the first fruits of the wheat harvest. For Christians, the experience of the energy of the Spirit is a "first fruit" of the new era that has dawned for the believers; a “first fruit” of the coming Kingdom of God.
I would also like us to pray today at St John's Seven Kings for the coming of the Holy Spirit among us in a very particular way and for a very specific task that we are engaged in at this time. I said at our Annual Parochial Church Meeting that, as we seek to affirm and encourage the calling of the whole people of God by identifying and releasing all the gifts God has given us, we will be establishing a Ministry Leadership Team here at St John’s.
A Ministry Leadership Team is essentially those who lead, encourage and build up the work of the whole Body of Christ on behalf of the PCC. To help us to do this, we have divided up our mission and ministry here at St John’s into five areas – Children and Youth, Mission, Pastoral, Peace and Justice, and Worship.
Over the next couple of months we are looking to identify people who can take a lead at St John’s in these five areas and we need each of you to be involved in identifying who those people should be. First, we need you to pray. To pray for the Holy Spirit to equip those in our congregation who are being called to these roles and to pray for the Holy Spirit to lead and guide us as we identify those who are being called. Second, we will need you to suggest people for these different roles by filling in this sheet and returning it to us. Shortly I will be able to introduce you to Diocesan Advisers who will help us with this process.
As you pray and think about those that the Holy Spirit may be calling into these roles, bear in mind that the people we are seeking as members of the Ministry Leadership Team at St Johns are those who have a developing spiritual life of their own and who seek to nurture and disciple others. Those chosen to form the Ministry Leadership Team will work together with those involved in the activities listed on the sheet to take forward their Area of Responsibility, will meet regularly with the Staff Team to plan and pray together, and will report to the PCC.
It is the Holy Spirit, as we have seen, that gives gifts to God’s people to prepare all of us for God’s service in order to build up the body of Christ – “The Spirit’s presence is shown in some way in each person for the good of all.” As we identify and release all the gifts God has given us we become more effectively his church, we have growing confidence and a greater sense of moving forward, and we come back to patterns of church life that more resemble the missionary church of the first century.
As we ask God that that might happen, let pray together the prayer for the Global Day of Prayer with which we began:
Spirit of the living God, apart from You, we can do nothing.
Transform Your Church into the image of Jesus Christ.
Release Your power to bring healing to the sick,
freedom to the oppressed and comfort to those who mourn.
Pour Your love into our hearts and fill us with compassion
to answer the call of the homeless and the hungry
and to enfold orphans, widows and the elderly in Your care.
Give us wisdom and insight for the complex problems we face today.
Help us to use the resources of the earth for the well-being of all.
Holy Spirit, we need Your comfort and guidance.
Transform our hearts. Amen.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
St. Paul's Cathedral Choir - Come Holy Ghost Our Souls Inspire.
Sunday, 12 June 2011
Friday, 10 June 2011
Airbrushed from Art History (26)
"We no longer live in an era where being an artist automatically means being a religious artist," notes Maria Walsh in Open the Door to the Redeemer:
"In the great age of faith, religious themes provided a ready made and universal image-repertoire for artists to draw on. To be a religious artist at the beginning of the twenty-first century, at a time when the universal values of faith are being challenged, is to embark on a personal spiritual quest. Images produced as a result of this exploration will undoubtedly resonate with the religious beliefs of others, but, unlike the universalism of a classical artist like Raphael, the vision of the contemporary religious artist also runs the risk of being a lone cry in the desert. This conflicting position is a little like the one occupied by the self-taught artist in relation to the contemporary art world establishment. On the one hand, because of the seeming naivete of his formal skills, the self-taught artist is marginalized, but, on the other hand, he is valued for the very things which make him different from the mainstream, i.e. the simplicity and sponteneity with which he communicates his internal world."
Walsh's point is doubly magnified for those self-taught artists, of which there are many, who are also religious artists.
"The emergence of self-taught or vernacular artists, as the confusion about their name implies, followed several entwined paths," writes Leslie Luebbers in Coming Home! Self-Taught Artists, the Bible and the American South, "from outsider (or psychologically abnormal) artists, promoted by French artist Jean Dubuffet, to a renewed interest in living American folk art traditions, to an effort, similar to the feminist endeavor, to recover and present the work of black artists, who rarely had access to academic training."
Walsh unpacks the spiritual thread within this development:
"Many mainstream artists working in the early part of the twentieth century, Such as Jean Dubuffet (1901 - 1985), Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944), and Paul Klee (1879 - 1940), were very interested in so-called 'outsider art', (art by self-taught and folk artists, children's art and art by the psychologically disturbed), because they felt that this work was creatively inventive as opposed to the rigid traditions of classical culture. They attempted to incorporate the innocence and raw vision of untrained artists into their own work in an attempt to revitalize creatively deadening traditions. They also thought that this work resonated on a spiritual level that was missing in academic art. While the spiritual levels in Kandinsky's or Klee's work is often very abstract and cerebral, in the work of Expressionist artist, Georges Rouault (1871 - 1958), the innocance and rawness of simple form was used to convey a much more humanist spiritual message ... Both the religious artist and the self-taught artist can be said to combine fragments of inherited traditions with an intensely personal inner vision to invent a pictorial world that is resolutely spiritual."
In some sense, Alice Rae Yelen writes in Passionate Visions of the American South, "all self-taught artists might be described as visionary, as they each draw primarily on inner resources, and all work created from internal inspiration can be said to be motivated by a spiritual force, which may or may not be interpreted as a religious impulse."
Rae Yelen writes about the religious visions of self-taught artists from the American South and suggests that "... religion and spiritual inspiration are so important in the southern way of life, it is hard to imagine a more fertile environment for the creation of religious and visionary imagery." This is because, "In the South, religious practice is dominated by evangelical Protestantism and is far more homogeneous and integral to daily life than in other areas of the country":
"Most evangelical southern Protestants, whether black or white, rural or urban, restrained or charismatic, Baptist, Pentecostal, or otherwise, believe in the Bible as the ultimate moral authority. They consider access to the Holy Spirit and thereby conversion to be direct; they uphold traditional morality as defined by their church; and because church authority is decentralized, they accept informal worship. Each of these conditions finds a corollary, subtly or straightforwardly, in the work of many southern self-taught artists ...
Many artists who produce narrative biblical subjects claim direct communication with God. Others simply tell Bible stories, commonly learned in childhood, Sunday School, or church. Some are lay preachers, often leaders of their own churches; others have no conventional religious affirmation. Self-proclaimed preachers abound in the ranks of self-taught artists, including Sister Gertrude Morgan, Howard Finster, Anderson Johnson, Rev. Benjamin F. Perkins, Rev. Johnnie Swearingen, Elijah Pierce, Josephus Farmer, Edgar Tolson, and R. A. Miller."
Carol Crown notes in Coming Home! that:
"Unlike the religious art of earlier eras, the creations of unschooled artists working in the South are not normally commissioned by nor intended for an institutional patron. Rather, these works are highly personal expressions, made by artists who have in mind a variety of functions: decorative, critical, didactic, proselytistic, or contemplative. Many of these artists identify themselves as evangelical Christians and share common religious beliefs, but even the work of those who do not espouse this brand of faith or who believe themselves untouched by its influence does not always escape the impact of evangelical Christianity in the South."
However, religious art by self-taught artists is not restricted solely to the American South. Matt Lamb, an "internationally-recognized Chicago artist whose work is ... in the Vatican Museums, is a religious artist and a self-taught artist." Walsh writes of his work:
"To build his densely scumbled surfaces, Lamb coarsens oil paint by adulterating its sensuousness with grit, sand, tar and other non-art materials. In this, Lamb continues to explore the innovative techniques brought into the tradition of oil-painting by the aforementioned Dubuffet who used similar materials on his canvases, as did the American Abstract Expressionist, Jackson Pollock (1912 - 1956). Here there is a meeting of two worlds - what the self-taught artist adopts to invent a style, the trained artist adopts to escape style. Often in Lamb's work, the flame of a butane torch is played across his canvases allowing heat and combustion to sear his images. Lamb's synthesis of disparate elements into a unifying meld, by this and other methods, is a process which echoes the message of spiritual transformation voiced in his work. Lamb does not work from drawings but searches for the forms of his images in the shapes suggested by the blottings of paint he smears onto the blank canvas. To achieve these blottings, Lamb will often press a new canvas against the face of an earlier finished work. In this way, he destroys the silence of the blank canvas. There is something rather than nothing from which to create. The challenge of the chaotic unformed surface to Lamb's inner imagination could be said to parallel the challenge faced by the spiritual traveller to give form and conviction to the tenets of his or her faith."
William Kurelek's "struggle to find himself, to become a painter, led through the depths of a personal hell, depicted in such paintings as "I Spit on Life," "The Maze" and "Behold Man without God" (1955), the latter painted before, and named only after, his conversion to Roman Catholicism" writes Ramsey Cook in Kurelek Country:
"The period spent in psychiatric care in Great Britain led to the resolution of his personal crisis, and he emerged a totally committed Christian and a man resolute in his vocation as an artist. Convinced that his recovery was a miracle of God, not science, he rejected suggestions that his account of these years would have been improved by blue-pencilling the lengthy theological discussions. That, he insisted, would have meant "cutting the heart out of the body." Kurelek had now found his mission: it was to use his talents, as he believed God intended that he should, in supporting the cause of Christian belief and action. "What I am sure of," he wrote at the end of his autobiography, "is that I am not really alone anymore in the rest of my journey through this tragic, wonderful world. There is Someone with me. And He has asked me to get up because there is work to be done ...
One of his finest paintings, "Dinner Time on the Prairies" (1963), was included in a series entitled "Experiments in Didactic Art." A note he scribbled made plain his determination to give immediacy to Christian precepts:
This is an intuative painting. I was wondering how to paint a western religious painting and suddenly this idea came to me, so it is open to interpretation. A meaning I put on it that which crucifies Christ over and over can just as easily happen on a summer day on a Manitoba farm as anywhere else. The farmer and his son doing the fencing may have had an argument just before dinner or one of them may have enjoyed a lustful thought. Or got an idea how to avenge himself on a neighbor etc."
He knew that some critics would be unhappy about this kind of painting, even those who praised his farm scenes, so he issued an explanatory manifesto, in which he pointed out that many artists - Bosch, Bruegel, Goya, Hogarth, Daumier and Diego Rivera - had painted pictures of a didactic kind, and they were accepted as great artists. "I don't pretent to put my work on a level with theirs," he explained with his usual modesty, "but I nevertheless do have something to say just as they did."
Not only are self-taught religious artists not solely from the American South but, as Erika Doss argues in Coming Home!, "Artists who are labeled "modern" and "contemporary," like Rothko, Tobey, Warhol, and Weisberg, and those called "self-taught" or "outsider," such as Rowe, Murray, Morgan, and Finster, share interests in faith and spirituality and express them in visually diverse strains."compares the spirituality found in the work of such artists with that found in the work of mainstream artists:
"... compare the stylistically similar paintings of John "J. B." Murray and Mark Tobey (1890 - 1976), both of whom adopted distinctive compositions of "all-over" calligraphic patterning for specific religious purposes. Murray began creating "spirit drawings" ... after experiencing a vision from God to move his hands "in a manner willed by His power." A member of a Southern Baptist church where glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, was not uncommon. Murray's glossographia were the visual embodiment of his personal religious beliefs: painted prophecies of good and evil, visually elaborate incantations of a deeply private faith.
Transferring the word of God into visual form, Murray's work is similar to that of Southern evangelical artists such as Sister Gertrude Morgan and Howard Finster, whose paintings ... are similarly crammed with dense script and obsessively detailed imagery ...
These comparisons suggest that American artists of all varieties are clearly engaged in visualising faith. Some, such as Murray and Tobey, are drawn to the subject of religion as a means of defining and expressing the dimensions of their beliefs. Others, including artists ranging from William Hawkins to Kiki Smith (b. 1954), select religious subjects as a means of interrogating the institutional boundaries of mainstream belief systems. Hawkin's Last Supper #6, 1986, for examples challenges traditional Western European notions of the participants in that biblical scene by painting Christ's disciples as a diverse group of men and women, black and white ... Similarly, Smith's Virgin Mary, 1992, diverges from conventional representations of the mother of Christ as a divine conduit of grace by depicting Mary as a fleshy, vulnerable, and distinctly human figure.
Some artists engaged in the intersections of art and religion see themselves as visionaries whose art mediates between a mysterious physical universe and their personal, subconscious, and imaginative understandings of the universe. Howard Finster recounted many times that he was a "man of visions," divinely appointed to "paint sacred art" after experiencing a visionary call in 1976. Likewise, Minnie Evans turned to religious art after experiencing vivid dreams and revelations and hearing the voice of God command her to "draw or die".
As a result, Doss argues that "such ... exhibitions as Testimony: Vernacular Art of the African-American South, 2000, and Let It Shine: Self-Taught Art from the T. Marshall Hahn Collection, 2001, highlighted the importance of religion, particularly evangelical Christianity, among a number of Southern "self-taught" artists. However well-intentioned, by featuring painters and sculptors who have been arbitrarily categorized as "different" from "mainstream" artists on the basis of formal art education, such exhibitions reinforce assumptions that the visual expression of religious belief lies mainly in the purview of a seemingly isolated group of "self-taught" artists living primarily in America's Bible Belt."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Talking Heads - Road To Nowhere.
"In the great age of faith, religious themes provided a ready made and universal image-repertoire for artists to draw on. To be a religious artist at the beginning of the twenty-first century, at a time when the universal values of faith are being challenged, is to embark on a personal spiritual quest. Images produced as a result of this exploration will undoubtedly resonate with the religious beliefs of others, but, unlike the universalism of a classical artist like Raphael, the vision of the contemporary religious artist also runs the risk of being a lone cry in the desert. This conflicting position is a little like the one occupied by the self-taught artist in relation to the contemporary art world establishment. On the one hand, because of the seeming naivete of his formal skills, the self-taught artist is marginalized, but, on the other hand, he is valued for the very things which make him different from the mainstream, i.e. the simplicity and sponteneity with which he communicates his internal world."
Walsh's point is doubly magnified for those self-taught artists, of which there are many, who are also religious artists.
"The emergence of self-taught or vernacular artists, as the confusion about their name implies, followed several entwined paths," writes Leslie Luebbers in Coming Home! Self-Taught Artists, the Bible and the American South, "from outsider (or psychologically abnormal) artists, promoted by French artist Jean Dubuffet, to a renewed interest in living American folk art traditions, to an effort, similar to the feminist endeavor, to recover and present the work of black artists, who rarely had access to academic training."
Walsh unpacks the spiritual thread within this development:
"Many mainstream artists working in the early part of the twentieth century, Such as Jean Dubuffet (1901 - 1985), Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944), and Paul Klee (1879 - 1940), were very interested in so-called 'outsider art', (art by self-taught and folk artists, children's art and art by the psychologically disturbed), because they felt that this work was creatively inventive as opposed to the rigid traditions of classical culture. They attempted to incorporate the innocence and raw vision of untrained artists into their own work in an attempt to revitalize creatively deadening traditions. They also thought that this work resonated on a spiritual level that was missing in academic art. While the spiritual levels in Kandinsky's or Klee's work is often very abstract and cerebral, in the work of Expressionist artist, Georges Rouault (1871 - 1958), the innocance and rawness of simple form was used to convey a much more humanist spiritual message ... Both the religious artist and the self-taught artist can be said to combine fragments of inherited traditions with an intensely personal inner vision to invent a pictorial world that is resolutely spiritual."
In some sense, Alice Rae Yelen writes in Passionate Visions of the American South, "all self-taught artists might be described as visionary, as they each draw primarily on inner resources, and all work created from internal inspiration can be said to be motivated by a spiritual force, which may or may not be interpreted as a religious impulse."
Rae Yelen writes about the religious visions of self-taught artists from the American South and suggests that "... religion and spiritual inspiration are so important in the southern way of life, it is hard to imagine a more fertile environment for the creation of religious and visionary imagery." This is because, "In the South, religious practice is dominated by evangelical Protestantism and is far more homogeneous and integral to daily life than in other areas of the country":
"Most evangelical southern Protestants, whether black or white, rural or urban, restrained or charismatic, Baptist, Pentecostal, or otherwise, believe in the Bible as the ultimate moral authority. They consider access to the Holy Spirit and thereby conversion to be direct; they uphold traditional morality as defined by their church; and because church authority is decentralized, they accept informal worship. Each of these conditions finds a corollary, subtly or straightforwardly, in the work of many southern self-taught artists ...
Many artists who produce narrative biblical subjects claim direct communication with God. Others simply tell Bible stories, commonly learned in childhood, Sunday School, or church. Some are lay preachers, often leaders of their own churches; others have no conventional religious affirmation. Self-proclaimed preachers abound in the ranks of self-taught artists, including Sister Gertrude Morgan, Howard Finster, Anderson Johnson, Rev. Benjamin F. Perkins, Rev. Johnnie Swearingen, Elijah Pierce, Josephus Farmer, Edgar Tolson, and R. A. Miller."
Carol Crown notes in Coming Home! that:
"Unlike the religious art of earlier eras, the creations of unschooled artists working in the South are not normally commissioned by nor intended for an institutional patron. Rather, these works are highly personal expressions, made by artists who have in mind a variety of functions: decorative, critical, didactic, proselytistic, or contemplative. Many of these artists identify themselves as evangelical Christians and share common religious beliefs, but even the work of those who do not espouse this brand of faith or who believe themselves untouched by its influence does not always escape the impact of evangelical Christianity in the South."
However, religious art by self-taught artists is not restricted solely to the American South. Matt Lamb, an "internationally-recognized Chicago artist whose work is ... in the Vatican Museums, is a religious artist and a self-taught artist." Walsh writes of his work:
"To build his densely scumbled surfaces, Lamb coarsens oil paint by adulterating its sensuousness with grit, sand, tar and other non-art materials. In this, Lamb continues to explore the innovative techniques brought into the tradition of oil-painting by the aforementioned Dubuffet who used similar materials on his canvases, as did the American Abstract Expressionist, Jackson Pollock (1912 - 1956). Here there is a meeting of two worlds - what the self-taught artist adopts to invent a style, the trained artist adopts to escape style. Often in Lamb's work, the flame of a butane torch is played across his canvases allowing heat and combustion to sear his images. Lamb's synthesis of disparate elements into a unifying meld, by this and other methods, is a process which echoes the message of spiritual transformation voiced in his work. Lamb does not work from drawings but searches for the forms of his images in the shapes suggested by the blottings of paint he smears onto the blank canvas. To achieve these blottings, Lamb will often press a new canvas against the face of an earlier finished work. In this way, he destroys the silence of the blank canvas. There is something rather than nothing from which to create. The challenge of the chaotic unformed surface to Lamb's inner imagination could be said to parallel the challenge faced by the spiritual traveller to give form and conviction to the tenets of his or her faith."
William Kurelek's "struggle to find himself, to become a painter, led through the depths of a personal hell, depicted in such paintings as "I Spit on Life," "The Maze" and "Behold Man without God" (1955), the latter painted before, and named only after, his conversion to Roman Catholicism" writes Ramsey Cook in Kurelek Country:
"The period spent in psychiatric care in Great Britain led to the resolution of his personal crisis, and he emerged a totally committed Christian and a man resolute in his vocation as an artist. Convinced that his recovery was a miracle of God, not science, he rejected suggestions that his account of these years would have been improved by blue-pencilling the lengthy theological discussions. That, he insisted, would have meant "cutting the heart out of the body." Kurelek had now found his mission: it was to use his talents, as he believed God intended that he should, in supporting the cause of Christian belief and action. "What I am sure of," he wrote at the end of his autobiography, "is that I am not really alone anymore in the rest of my journey through this tragic, wonderful world. There is Someone with me. And He has asked me to get up because there is work to be done ...
One of his finest paintings, "Dinner Time on the Prairies" (1963), was included in a series entitled "Experiments in Didactic Art." A note he scribbled made plain his determination to give immediacy to Christian precepts:
This is an intuative painting. I was wondering how to paint a western religious painting and suddenly this idea came to me, so it is open to interpretation. A meaning I put on it that which crucifies Christ over and over can just as easily happen on a summer day on a Manitoba farm as anywhere else. The farmer and his son doing the fencing may have had an argument just before dinner or one of them may have enjoyed a lustful thought. Or got an idea how to avenge himself on a neighbor etc."
He knew that some critics would be unhappy about this kind of painting, even those who praised his farm scenes, so he issued an explanatory manifesto, in which he pointed out that many artists - Bosch, Bruegel, Goya, Hogarth, Daumier and Diego Rivera - had painted pictures of a didactic kind, and they were accepted as great artists. "I don't pretent to put my work on a level with theirs," he explained with his usual modesty, "but I nevertheless do have something to say just as they did."
Not only are self-taught religious artists not solely from the American South but, as Erika Doss argues in Coming Home!, "Artists who are labeled "modern" and "contemporary," like Rothko, Tobey, Warhol, and Weisberg, and those called "self-taught" or "outsider," such as Rowe, Murray, Morgan, and Finster, share interests in faith and spirituality and express them in visually diverse strains."compares the spirituality found in the work of such artists with that found in the work of mainstream artists:
"... compare the stylistically similar paintings of John "J. B." Murray and Mark Tobey (1890 - 1976), both of whom adopted distinctive compositions of "all-over" calligraphic patterning for specific religious purposes. Murray began creating "spirit drawings" ... after experiencing a vision from God to move his hands "in a manner willed by His power." A member of a Southern Baptist church where glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, was not uncommon. Murray's glossographia were the visual embodiment of his personal religious beliefs: painted prophecies of good and evil, visually elaborate incantations of a deeply private faith.
Transferring the word of God into visual form, Murray's work is similar to that of Southern evangelical artists such as Sister Gertrude Morgan and Howard Finster, whose paintings ... are similarly crammed with dense script and obsessively detailed imagery ...
These comparisons suggest that American artists of all varieties are clearly engaged in visualising faith. Some, such as Murray and Tobey, are drawn to the subject of religion as a means of defining and expressing the dimensions of their beliefs. Others, including artists ranging from William Hawkins to Kiki Smith (b. 1954), select religious subjects as a means of interrogating the institutional boundaries of mainstream belief systems. Hawkin's Last Supper #6, 1986, for examples challenges traditional Western European notions of the participants in that biblical scene by painting Christ's disciples as a diverse group of men and women, black and white ... Similarly, Smith's Virgin Mary, 1992, diverges from conventional representations of the mother of Christ as a divine conduit of grace by depicting Mary as a fleshy, vulnerable, and distinctly human figure.
Some artists engaged in the intersections of art and religion see themselves as visionaries whose art mediates between a mysterious physical universe and their personal, subconscious, and imaginative understandings of the universe. Howard Finster recounted many times that he was a "man of visions," divinely appointed to "paint sacred art" after experiencing a visionary call in 1976. Likewise, Minnie Evans turned to religious art after experiencing vivid dreams and revelations and hearing the voice of God command her to "draw or die".
As a result, Doss argues that "such ... exhibitions as Testimony: Vernacular Art of the African-American South, 2000, and Let It Shine: Self-Taught Art from the T. Marshall Hahn Collection, 2001, highlighted the importance of religion, particularly evangelical Christianity, among a number of Southern "self-taught" artists. However well-intentioned, by featuring painters and sculptors who have been arbitrarily categorized as "different" from "mainstream" artists on the basis of formal art education, such exhibitions reinforce assumptions that the visual expression of religious belief lies mainly in the purview of a seemingly isolated group of "self-taught" artists living primarily in America's Bible Belt."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Talking Heads - Road To Nowhere.
Thursday, 9 June 2011
New Statesman and Big Society
The latest edition of the New Statesman has been guest-edited by Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and has managed to put the cat among the pigeons as he used his leader to warn the coalition government that it is committing the country to "radical, long-term policies for which no one voted". Reaction to his piece is being collated on the New Statesman website and can be read by clicking here.
Dr Williams commissioned a wide range of essays, articles and reports in conjunction with New Statesman editors for the 80-page special issue, including articles by Philip Pullman on being a "Church of England atheist", Iain Duncan Smith on cracking down on welfare abuse, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on why religion can build a better society than the so-called "big society", Gordon Brown on how the world is failing young people and Richard Curtis on malaria, being commissioned by an Archbishop. He also discussed Libya, torture and Britain's declining role in the world with Foreign Secretary William Hague.
Looking at new research by the Harvard sociologist Robert Puttnam, Jonathan Sacks writes that places of worship still bring people together in "mutual responsibility":
"The evidence shows that religious people - defined by regular attendance at a place of worship - actually do make better neighbours."
The research shows that this willingness to give time to volunteering is directly tied to the frequency with which they attend a place of worship. Sacks suggests a reason for this:
"Religion creates community, community creates altruism and altruism turns us away from self and towards the common good... There is something about the tenor of relationships within a religious community that makes it the best tutorial in citizenship and good neighbourliness."
"If we're searching for the big society, this is where we will find it," writes Sacks. However, he is not romantic about this, and expresses some reservations about the big society agenda:
"Does this mean that we are about to become more religious as a society, or that charity is an adequate substitute for government spending, or that faith communities are our only source of altruism? No. Britain, relative to the US, is a highly secular society. Philanthropy alone cannot fill the gap left by government cutbacks. And the sources of altruism go deep into our evolutionary past."
All particularly apposite as today I firmed up details of a Big Society Mapping Event, organised together with the London Borough of Redbridge, for faith groups in the borough which is to be held on Tuesday 5th July from 10.30am - 1.00pm at Holy Trinity Barkingside (Holy Trinity Church, Mossford Green, Barkingside, IG6 2BX).
The event will include presentations from Tasnim Iqbal, Redbridge CVS and Chair of the Big Society Working Group, and either Cllr Alan Weinberg, Cabinet Member for Children's Services, or John Powell, Director of Adult Social Services. The event will provide faith groups with an opportunity to contribute information on the kind of services and facilities that we currently provide in the borough and to explore how faiths group and the Council can work more closely to provide new opportunities in the borough.
I'll be contributing to the event on the Big Society in Redbridge from a faith perspective and will no doubt draw on some of the Chief Rabbi's insights.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Holmes Brothers - Feed My Soul.
Dr Williams commissioned a wide range of essays, articles and reports in conjunction with New Statesman editors for the 80-page special issue, including articles by Philip Pullman on being a "Church of England atheist", Iain Duncan Smith on cracking down on welfare abuse, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on why religion can build a better society than the so-called "big society", Gordon Brown on how the world is failing young people and Richard Curtis on malaria, being commissioned by an Archbishop. He also discussed Libya, torture and Britain's declining role in the world with Foreign Secretary William Hague.
Looking at new research by the Harvard sociologist Robert Puttnam, Jonathan Sacks writes that places of worship still bring people together in "mutual responsibility":
"The evidence shows that religious people - defined by regular attendance at a place of worship - actually do make better neighbours."
The research shows that this willingness to give time to volunteering is directly tied to the frequency with which they attend a place of worship. Sacks suggests a reason for this:
"Religion creates community, community creates altruism and altruism turns us away from self and towards the common good... There is something about the tenor of relationships within a religious community that makes it the best tutorial in citizenship and good neighbourliness."
"If we're searching for the big society, this is where we will find it," writes Sacks. However, he is not romantic about this, and expresses some reservations about the big society agenda:
"Does this mean that we are about to become more religious as a society, or that charity is an adequate substitute for government spending, or that faith communities are our only source of altruism? No. Britain, relative to the US, is a highly secular society. Philanthropy alone cannot fill the gap left by government cutbacks. And the sources of altruism go deep into our evolutionary past."
All particularly apposite as today I firmed up details of a Big Society Mapping Event, organised together with the London Borough of Redbridge, for faith groups in the borough which is to be held on Tuesday 5th July from 10.30am - 1.00pm at Holy Trinity Barkingside (Holy Trinity Church, Mossford Green, Barkingside, IG6 2BX).
The event will include presentations from Tasnim Iqbal, Redbridge CVS and Chair of the Big Society Working Group, and either Cllr Alan Weinberg, Cabinet Member for Children's Services, or John Powell, Director of Adult Social Services. The event will provide faith groups with an opportunity to contribute information on the kind of services and facilities that we currently provide in the borough and to explore how faiths group and the Council can work more closely to provide new opportunities in the borough.
I'll be contributing to the event on the Big Society in Redbridge from a faith perspective and will no doubt draw on some of the Chief Rabbi's insights.
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The Holmes Brothers - Feed My Soul.
Christian-Muslim Youth statement on Trade Justice
Yesterday I attended the networking lunch with representatives from NGOs and faith organisations held at Lambeth Palace at which young Christians and Muslims reported their discussions and conclusions during the Christian-Muslim Youth Forum on Trade Justice organised by the Christian-Muslim Forum and MADE in Europe.
As part of this Forum the young people present issued a Statement on Trade Justice in which, as young people of the Christian and Islamic faiths, they called upon our government to acknowledge their voice and attend to the crucial issue of trade injustice which is keeping millions of people around the world in poverty:
"... As faith communities, we are committed to upholding the principles of justice, fairness and honouring the dignity of every human being. In Christianity, Jesus said, "love thy neighbour as thyself". In Islam there is the saying of the Prophet Muhammad, "none of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes himself" – peace and blessings be upon them both. Tackling trade injustice is a poverty issue, it is a human rights issue, and it inherently concerns the dignity of our neighbours, our brothers and sisters around the world. Not only do fair trade rules offer opportunities for improving education, health provision, and other social amenities, tackling unjust trade in turn addresses social, racial, and gender inequality.
It has come to our attention that cotton farmers in West Africa have been increasingly side-lined as EU and US subsidies privilege European and North American cotton producers. This is despite the natural competitive advantage West Africa should be thriving off, given the abundance of cotton production in countries such as Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali. These unfair trade rules are directly affecting the livelihoods of millions of people in our world. It is unjustifiable for the US and the EU to push for developing countries to remove government support to agriculture while they subsidise their own famers at home, distorting world price through over-production.
Now is the time to act. We were pleased to hear that earlier this year you reaffirmed the government's commitment to ensuring the elimination of unfair EU trade subsidies. We now ask you to continue to use your influence, and political integrity, in the upcoming CAP policy reviews in 2013 in support of the world's poorest cotton farmers in West Africa by:
building a coalition for support for eliminating EU coupled cotton subsidies among European member statesbriefing and supporting UK MEPs to vote in favour of de-coupling cotton subsidies given CAP 2020 will be agreed by co-decisionmaking direct representations to the EU Agriculture Commissioner on the impact of cotton subsidies on West African cotton farmersasking your colleagues in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office to make representations to the US government to encourage the US to drop its trade distorting cotton subsidies ..."
The Archbishop of Canterbury's speech to the Youth Forum can be heard by clicking here.
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Ladysmith Black Mambazo - Homeless.
As part of this Forum the young people present issued a Statement on Trade Justice in which, as young people of the Christian and Islamic faiths, they called upon our government to acknowledge their voice and attend to the crucial issue of trade injustice which is keeping millions of people around the world in poverty:
"... As faith communities, we are committed to upholding the principles of justice, fairness and honouring the dignity of every human being. In Christianity, Jesus said, "love thy neighbour as thyself". In Islam there is the saying of the Prophet Muhammad, "none of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes himself" – peace and blessings be upon them both. Tackling trade injustice is a poverty issue, it is a human rights issue, and it inherently concerns the dignity of our neighbours, our brothers and sisters around the world. Not only do fair trade rules offer opportunities for improving education, health provision, and other social amenities, tackling unjust trade in turn addresses social, racial, and gender inequality.
It has come to our attention that cotton farmers in West Africa have been increasingly side-lined as EU and US subsidies privilege European and North American cotton producers. This is despite the natural competitive advantage West Africa should be thriving off, given the abundance of cotton production in countries such as Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali. These unfair trade rules are directly affecting the livelihoods of millions of people in our world. It is unjustifiable for the US and the EU to push for developing countries to remove government support to agriculture while they subsidise their own famers at home, distorting world price through over-production.
Now is the time to act. We were pleased to hear that earlier this year you reaffirmed the government's commitment to ensuring the elimination of unfair EU trade subsidies. We now ask you to continue to use your influence, and political integrity, in the upcoming CAP policy reviews in 2013 in support of the world's poorest cotton farmers in West Africa by:
building a coalition for support for eliminating EU coupled cotton subsidies among European member statesbriefing and supporting UK MEPs to vote in favour of de-coupling cotton subsidies given CAP 2020 will be agreed by co-decisionmaking direct representations to the EU Agriculture Commissioner on the impact of cotton subsidies on West African cotton farmersasking your colleagues in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office to make representations to the US government to encourage the US to drop its trade distorting cotton subsidies ..."
The Archbishop of Canterbury's speech to the Youth Forum can be heard by clicking here.
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Ladysmith Black Mambazo - Homeless.
Windows on the world (157)
Bath, 2011
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The Nerves - Hanging On The Telephone.
Wednesday, 8 June 2011
A Local Dialogue
From January to March 2011, Artist in Residence Sadia Ur-Rehman hosted six tea parties at Valentines Mansion as part of her project ‘A Local Dialogue’. Over 150 million cups of tea are drunk daily in Britain today, we are now a nation of tea drinkers with tea being our most drunk and favourite beverage. Ur-Rehman as a tea lover herself decided to host the tea parties for local residents, creating a communal space for local people to meet and discuss the local area.
‘’The idea for the tea parties came about from my own love of the beverage and how a good cuppa can be the setting for a really good conversation. I wanted to create a space where strangers could connect and engage over a conversation and I thought about an activity that all communities and cultures shared, and tea drinking seemed apt.”
Each tea party served a different type of tea from a different part of the world, guests were able to experience how tea is drunk in South Asia, North Africa, Persia, China and of course England. An authentic experience was provided with each tea party, Ur-Rehman also set a topic of conversation about the local area and history. During the tea parties, the artist collected and recorded stories, memories, experiences of the local area and Valentines Mansion.
The exhibition at Valentines Mansion which is open till Sunday 24th July is a culmination of the conversations that took place during the tea parties and the walk the artist facilitated in April. The artist has utilised a range of multimedia practices to present the conversations from an audio installation, silent film, photographs and an installation dedicated to tea. The project was initiated to empower local communities to play a part in the creation of art through local engagement; local residents whom attended the tea parties and walk played a vital role in this. The project so far has engaged 120 local residents as participants of the project, making art accessible to new audiences and increasing participation in the arts across Redbridge.
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Bruce Cockburn - The Iris of the World.
Tuesday, 7 June 2011
Taste of Religion
Yesterday I spoke about Christian Festivals at the Taste of Religion event organised by the Employer's Forum on Belief at KPMG.
Rabbi Dr Naftali Brawer, Senior Rabbi at Borehamwood & Elstree United Synagogue, spoke about the significance of rest based on the Jewish understanding of sabbath. Khola Hasan, Director of Albatross Consultancy Limited, spoke about the disciplines of Islamic prayer and the two main Islamic Festivals of Ramadan and the Hajj. Shaunaka Rishi Das, Director, Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and Hindu Chaplain to the University of Oxford, spoke about the way in which Hinduism integrates religion and philosophy. Dr Satinder Singh, Sikh Human Rights Group, highlighted the significance of equality within Sikhism. Simon Webley, Institute of Business Ethics, described their report: Religious Practices in the Workplace.
I briefly summarised the main Christian Festivals before concluding there are two main points arising for employers from such information:
"The first is that because some Christian festivals are officially sanctioned by governments as days when people are not required to work, Christians have not faced the same issues as those of other faiths in negotiating time off work to celebrate their religious festivals. However, this has also changed to a significant extent in more recent years as a result of flexible working patterns and Sunday opening, meaning that, as with those of other faiths, employers should sympathetically consider holiday requests from Christian employees in order to celebrate festivals or attend ceremonies where it is reasonable and practical for the employee to be away from work, and they have sufficient holiday entitlement in hand.
The second involves the perception that Christianity is not treated equally to other faiths, either because it is privileged or because it is disadvantaged. Every year the media features stories of Christian festivals, often Christmas, being 'banned' or constrained in some fashion, and often on the basis that their celebration offends those of other faiths. This is simply not the case. The Christian Muslim Forum, for example, has tried to address the issue by making a statement in 2006 which says:
“As Muslims and Christians together we are wholeheartedly committed to the recognition of Christian festivals. Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Jesus and we wish this significant part of the Christian heritage of this country to remain an acknowledged part of national life. We believe that the only beneficiaries of a declining Christian presence in public life are those committed to a totally non-religious standpoint. We value the presence of clear institutional markers within society of the reality and mystery of God in public life, rather than its absence.”
How can employers respond to these issues? The EFB has pointed out that the tendency among employers has been “to try to get information about faiths rather than to consider whether a request is reasonable”:
“Employers need to ask whether their policies can accommodate the issue rather than whether the request is relevant to the employee’s professed beliefs. For example if someone wants to wear particular head gear; the place to start is by asking whether your uniform policy accommodates the wearing of headgear. If the employee is prepared to wear the allowable headgear and reach a compromise, perhaps on colour or style, then the issue is resolved.”
The worth of this advice can be seen in a recent case linked to the celebration of Palm Sunday. In a case which hit national headlines, electrician Colin Atkinson had said he was prepared to lose his job rather than comply with a request from his employer the Wakefield and District Housing Trust to remove a palm cross from the dashboard of his company van. He had been asked to do so in line with a policy which bans all personal items from WDH vans, from religious symbols to logos and flags supporting sports teams.
The case was resolved when WDH and Mr Atkinson agreed that he will in future keep his palm cross on his glove compartment, out of sight of the general public. He said: ‘WDH have been very reasonable and supportive in reaching this agreement and are even now assisting in every way for me to have a comfortable return to work, allowing me to be close to my faith and end the matter.’ Yet, that reasonable accommodation could easily have been agreed when the matter arose without there being any need for the threat of disciplinary action or the resulting publicity that followed it. So, following the EFB's guidance from the start can often mean that such issues don't arise.
The 2001 Census found that over three-quarters of the population reported belonging to a religion. ‘The Management Agenda 2003’, produced by Roffey Park, claimed that nearly three-quarters of workers are interested in "learning to live the spiritual side of their values," with more than 40% of UK managers saying they would value the opportunity to discuss workplace spirituality with their colleagues and 53% experiencing tensions between "the spiritual side of their values and their work."
Making reasonable accommodations for religious or belief observance in the workplace and sympathetic consideration of requests to celebrate festivals or attend ceremonies for Christians, as for those of other faiths, will go some way to acknowledging the reality of religious faith or belief in our society and also to addressing some of the tensions that those who hold a religious faith or belief experience within the workplace.
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Emmylou Harris: Goodnight Old World.
Rabbi Dr Naftali Brawer, Senior Rabbi at Borehamwood & Elstree United Synagogue, spoke about the significance of rest based on the Jewish understanding of sabbath. Khola Hasan, Director of Albatross Consultancy Limited, spoke about the disciplines of Islamic prayer and the two main Islamic Festivals of Ramadan and the Hajj. Shaunaka Rishi Das, Director, Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and Hindu Chaplain to the University of Oxford, spoke about the way in which Hinduism integrates religion and philosophy. Dr Satinder Singh, Sikh Human Rights Group, highlighted the significance of equality within Sikhism. Simon Webley, Institute of Business Ethics, described their report: Religious Practices in the Workplace.
I briefly summarised the main Christian Festivals before concluding there are two main points arising for employers from such information:
"The first is that because some Christian festivals are officially sanctioned by governments as days when people are not required to work, Christians have not faced the same issues as those of other faiths in negotiating time off work to celebrate their religious festivals. However, this has also changed to a significant extent in more recent years as a result of flexible working patterns and Sunday opening, meaning that, as with those of other faiths, employers should sympathetically consider holiday requests from Christian employees in order to celebrate festivals or attend ceremonies where it is reasonable and practical for the employee to be away from work, and they have sufficient holiday entitlement in hand.
The second involves the perception that Christianity is not treated equally to other faiths, either because it is privileged or because it is disadvantaged. Every year the media features stories of Christian festivals, often Christmas, being 'banned' or constrained in some fashion, and often on the basis that their celebration offends those of other faiths. This is simply not the case. The Christian Muslim Forum, for example, has tried to address the issue by making a statement in 2006 which says:
“As Muslims and Christians together we are wholeheartedly committed to the recognition of Christian festivals. Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Jesus and we wish this significant part of the Christian heritage of this country to remain an acknowledged part of national life. We believe that the only beneficiaries of a declining Christian presence in public life are those committed to a totally non-religious standpoint. We value the presence of clear institutional markers within society of the reality and mystery of God in public life, rather than its absence.”
How can employers respond to these issues? The EFB has pointed out that the tendency among employers has been “to try to get information about faiths rather than to consider whether a request is reasonable”:
“Employers need to ask whether their policies can accommodate the issue rather than whether the request is relevant to the employee’s professed beliefs. For example if someone wants to wear particular head gear; the place to start is by asking whether your uniform policy accommodates the wearing of headgear. If the employee is prepared to wear the allowable headgear and reach a compromise, perhaps on colour or style, then the issue is resolved.”
The worth of this advice can be seen in a recent case linked to the celebration of Palm Sunday. In a case which hit national headlines, electrician Colin Atkinson had said he was prepared to lose his job rather than comply with a request from his employer the Wakefield and District Housing Trust to remove a palm cross from the dashboard of his company van. He had been asked to do so in line with a policy which bans all personal items from WDH vans, from religious symbols to logos and flags supporting sports teams.
The case was resolved when WDH and Mr Atkinson agreed that he will in future keep his palm cross on his glove compartment, out of sight of the general public. He said: ‘WDH have been very reasonable and supportive in reaching this agreement and are even now assisting in every way for me to have a comfortable return to work, allowing me to be close to my faith and end the matter.’ Yet, that reasonable accommodation could easily have been agreed when the matter arose without there being any need for the threat of disciplinary action or the resulting publicity that followed it. So, following the EFB's guidance from the start can often mean that such issues don't arise.
The 2001 Census found that over three-quarters of the population reported belonging to a religion. ‘The Management Agenda 2003’, produced by Roffey Park, claimed that nearly three-quarters of workers are interested in "learning to live the spiritual side of their values," with more than 40% of UK managers saying they would value the opportunity to discuss workplace spirituality with their colleagues and 53% experiencing tensions between "the spiritual side of their values and their work."
Making reasonable accommodations for religious or belief observance in the workplace and sympathetic consideration of requests to celebrate festivals or attend ceremonies for Christians, as for those of other faiths, will go some way to acknowledging the reality of religious faith or belief in our society and also to addressing some of the tensions that those who hold a religious faith or belief experience within the workplace.
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Emmylou Harris: Goodnight Old World.
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