Arts Roundup: Expanding Sacred Art, Jesus the Boxer and Iranian Hand Prints
February 25th, 2007 by Menachem Wecker
To director of the Halifax Shambhala Centre, Andrea Doukas, everything in the Shambhala Buddhist approach is “inherently sacred.” She adds:
In the Shambhala Buddhist tradition, we don’t make such a division between sacred and secular. We do hold events that aren’t religious practice in our shrine rooms, and we don’t consider that, because they are secular, that they are not also sacred. [The Chronicle Herald]
Paul Medina on sacred music and art and other cultural expressions of faith and worship, which are addressed to God.
Jesus the boxer, with Mercy written on his gloves, disgusts Robyn Myren:
the truth is that Christians produce a lot of cheese - we have our own little flourishing market for bad taste and warm feelings. When I see images like this one, or sketches of the Lord standing beside dental assistants and jugglers with captions that read “With You Always,” I can’t help but notice that we’ve turned our already redundant bumper stickers into illustrations and called them “art.”
A 20-minute tour of Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art (which opens soon) was enough to convince Prince Charles “This is a perfect blend of tradition and modern architecture.” [The Peninsula (Qatar)]
Art Hot Spots did not like Iran’s bienniale of handprints, but a mixture of typos and unclear language makes it difficult to understand exactly why.
Is Christian art a means for the church to ignore real problems and focus more on “fighting evil than allowing the light of Christ to overshadow the evil”? KNC Ramblings thinks so, but his post leaves me wishing he’d defend that point rather than simply asserting it.