MW: Why did you chose this story in particular?
JC: My father’s name was Nathan — he too was a very disciplined man willing to “speak truth to power.” On the morning of the unveiling of his grave site, I looked for the hallmark of the prophet Nathan’s life to find something to say about my father in the context of his namesake. And there it was — precisely how my father would go about getting someone to admit his wrongdoing.
MW: Does it bother you that this story is taught in a certain way in Jewish schools–downplaying the sin?
JC: I believe that the sages recognized that youngsters would have trouble dealing “gods with clay feet,” which led them to construct defenses, sometimes I believe disingenuous, for the great heroes of the bible. The problem is when we grow up, we’re still making excuses for the inexcusable in those heroes and therefore in our own conduct. Wouldn’t it be better to simply say that David sinned horribly, but that the beauty of the story is that David repented without seeking to self-justify, and so God forgave him and from his bloodline the Messiah will be born one day?
[popartpistol] It comes amid a sophomoric rant, but he has a point: “I don’t care about religious art, the people in religious art always have creepy, dead zombie eyes or are in severe amounts of pain.”
[Avalanche-Journal] Kenneth Jonsson happened to leave New Orleans with his 1,000 paintings two days before Katrina hit. Now he’s showing them all in two shows, one of the religious ones and the other the portraits.
[Democrat & Chronicle] Who says the medieval egg tempera painting style is outdated? A Brighton woman is teaching the “meditative” art.
[MSN, Daily Telegraph] The art provocateurs are at it again: this time it’s the Virgin in a burqa and Osama bin Laden as Jesus (see above) in Australia. See also a cynical post from Little Green Footballs. Money quote: “Reverend Rod Pattenden said he didn’t expect the exhibition to be controversial, ‘because the Christian community doesn’t look at art a great deal.’”
[University of Dayton] Brazilian artist Sidney Matias, whose work is coming to the Marian Library, shows how “the love we have for our faith can find expression” according to library’s director.
[Christian Today] A Malaysia newspaper has been banned from publishing for a month by the Muslim government for publishing a Jesus cartoon with a cigarette and beer. The Danish cartoon comparison is inevitable
[Detroit News] The Khalil Gibran International Academy, NYC’s first school to teach Arabic and Arab culture, encounters more hurdles.
[Journal of Islamic Studies] JIS reviews a reprint of Nubian Ceremonial Life: Studies in Islamic Syncretism and Cultural Change with a new introduction. “It is essential reading for ethnographers, students of religion and religious syncretism in Africa, and anthropologists,” writes Hussein Ahmed of Addis Ababa University. See also JIS on The Experience of Islamic Art on the Margins of Islam
[Religion News Blog] “Marble, limestone and sandstone and over 34,000 stone slabs, including over 2,000 hand-carved figurines”–meet Atlanta’s new Hindu temple, which one worker says “brings true Indian architecture and culture to life on American soil.”
[Washington Post] Romney turns down the opening of a film on Mormon history.
[NPR] “Jihad” the musical runs for 10 more days in London, and the cast hopes it will run in New York as well.
[BillOReilly.com] “The sad truth is that if an entertainment project espouses traditional values, applauds the USA, or embraces religion, a good number of American critics will hoot at it, and demean those who find it worthy, sometimes even citing Caligula,” writes Bill O’Reilly in High School Musical Blues.
[CBN] Swedish artist Lars Vilks has drawn the Prophet Mohammed as a dog (see here). Of course, there are a number of people who are offended by this. HT: Dogma Free America.
(Right) A 19th-century diptych, below, from the reign of King Menelik. From NPR’s World’s Oldest Hominid Now World’s Oldest Tourist.
[Dallas News Religion] Michael O’Brien on Harry Potter: “We might also consider for a moment the fact that no sane parents would give their children books which portrayed a set of “good” pimps and prostitutes valiantly fighting a set of “bad” pimps and prostitutes, and using the sexual acts of prostitution as the thrilling dynamic of the story.”
(Above) Grace Paley, from the IHT, Toby Talbot/The Associated Press.
From Margalit Fox’s great obituary for Paley in the IHT:
Paley was among the earliest American writers to explore the lives of women — mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers — in all their dailyness. She focused especially on single mothers, whose days were an exquisite mix of sexual yearning and pulverizing fatigue. In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind.
To read Paley’s fiction is to be awash in the shouts and murmurs of secular Yiddishkeit, with its wild onrushing joy and twilight melancholy. For her, cadence and character went hand in hand: her stories are marked by their minute attention to language, with its tonal rise and fall, its hairpin rhetorical reversals and its capacity for delicious hyperbolic understatement. Her stories, many of which are written in the first person and seem to start in mid-conversation, beg be read aloud.
The piece is worth reading in its entirety, and Paley’s own work is even more worthwhile.
[Sigmund, Carl and Alfred] “When moved by the power of faith, man created great cathedrals and monuments. There was a time when Islamic art, literature and architecture were grand expressions of man’s potential,” write Sigmund, Carl and Alfred, who have one of the best tag lines I’ve ever seen. “Today, mosques are cold, colorless, severe and drab. What motivates and inspires Muslims today is very different from those earlier expressions of faith.”
[NY Sun] Even people who have not experience Buddhist art can feel the “emotional rush” of a tangka.
[The Hindu] Indian art influence early Tibetan monastery paintings. “The art embodies a vision of compassion which permeates all of early Buddhist, Jain and Hindu art,” says one scholar.
[GS Jones] Notes from an interesting BYU lecture: “Passages from the Qur’an are displayed as artwork on walls, ceilings, and so forth. Muslim art is abstract and geometric, it does not represent something else. This is seen in Muslim architecture. The words of the Qur’an itself are art. Calligraphy (“beautiful writing”) from the Qur’an is art.”
[Jewish Press] Richard McBee’s column addresses Barry Frydlender at MoMA.
I interviewed Max Emadi (see his site here) about his work, primarily his Islamic Erotica series, for my recent pieces on contemporary Islamic art. Here’s one selection from his biography, “After becoming secure in his career as a psychotherapist and beginning his current job for the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health, as well as joining the adjunct faculty at Mount San Antonio College, he decided to revisit the artistic interests of his teens.” He spoke about atheism, President Bush as the emperor with no clothes, and responses to his work.
MW: In a statement on “Islamic Erotica” on your site, you write that nudes are taboo in the Islamic tradition. In your view, to what extent have Muslim artists historically respected Islamic laws? To what extent does Islamic law also forbid figurative art?
ME: I don’t by any means consider myself an authority on Islamic art. I think that artists from Islamic countries have challenge tradition historically like most artist. Persian miniature is a wonderful example. In many ways I think challenging/exposing social norms is an artists natural tendency.
I come from Iran which is basically a Theocracy. I don’t support Theocracies. They enforce their interpretation of Islamic law as strictly as they can although most of the population lives more liberally in secret. My Islamic Erotica series is a partial reaction to this fundamentalism. But it also is a comment on western sexism as well by referencing the tradition of “pinup” art.
[Arab American News] Sculptor Nida Kadhim says art “can play a central role in restoring Iraqis’ sense of nationhood and normalcy.”
[Today’s Zaman] Contemporary art on a blind date with Arabic calligraphy.
[“>Riverfront Times] Lewis Greenberg and his work Holocaust Revisited have a court date. “My yard is open to Nazis. My daughter-in-law in Texas is concerned about me,” he says.
[Mehr News Agency] Tehran announces winners of the first International Quranic Film Festival.
[Artdaily.org] Sotheby’s banks on Buddha, hoping for sales in the $8-11m range.
[Mehr News Agency] February 2008 will feature an artistic celebration of Iran’s Islamic revolution in Tehran.
[Surrey Comet] Reverend Kevin Scott, just back from a three-month sabbatical in Europe studying light in religious art, tries to make sense of a doorway.
[Economist] To strip in public, or not to strip in public?
[PopMatters] Frank London’s A Night in the Old Marketplace (based on I.L. Peretz) works only if you “abandon all hope of actually understanding what [you are] hearing, and just kind of groove on the songs.”
[Jesus in Love] Money quote from the exhibit Who Do You Say That I Am? Visions of Christ, Gender and Justice: “Yesterday’s scandal is today’s museum piece. Today’s scandal is tomorrow’s masterpiece.”
(Right) From the Scotsman’s review of Jihad: The Musical, which it credits with “a talented young cast from the US, with a pastiche-Broadway style soundtrack and an ample helping of wit.”
[St. Louis Post-Dispatch] When a church becomes a theater, efforts are made to preserve the religious art.
[Orange County Register] “If you have qualms about visiting an exhibition dominated by religious art, you probably shouldn’t go to ‘The Arts in Latin America, 1492-1820′ at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,” writes Richard Chang. If you have such qualms, you aren’t reading Iconia enough.
[Voice of America] The Islamic art exhibit which opened mid-July at the Ismaili Centre in London has attracted 10,000 people already.
[Chronicle of Higher Education] Virgil Griffith’s Wikipedia Scanner exposes who is editing their own Wikipedia pages. One example: “Web surfers can watch as an editor from Bob Jones University calls the campus museum ‘the great collection of religious art in the Western Hemisphere.’”
[The Atlantic] In a tale of Zionism, H. Sacher refers the Jerusalem-based “school of arts and crafts which is to be the mother of a revived Jewish art” and “a Hebrew literature, in a Hebrew art, in the myriad activities which make the life of a people on its own soil, under its own sky.”
[The Village Voice] In Larry Jordan’s The Sacred Art of Tibet (1972), part of the new Whitney show Summer of Love, includes “electronic growling [which] overwhelms explanatory voiceover and the artworks themselves are ‘animated’ through aggressive zooming and flash-frame superimposition. Reality is a ‘magic show,’ the narrator informs us. And magical thinking was then perceived as a form of political action.”
[mylittlefairytales] Due to a poor knee, mylittlefairytales has some time to appreciate the Islamic art around her house. The images are worth the look.
[Boar’s Head Tavern] Boar’s Head Tavern insists “I don’t doubt that there were pagan influences on early Christian art and cult, to some extent,” but “What I deny is that the Church’s beliefs about Mary are just gussied-up paganism.”
(Above) Arian Moayed and Daoud Heidami in Masked. Photograph by Aaron Epstein.
My column “Brotherly Hatred” is in this week’s Jewish Press. It covers “Masked” by Ilan Hatsor (translated by Michael Taub, directed by Ami Dayan):
If an Israeli settler and a Palestinian shopkeeper sat through Israeli playwright Ilan Hatsor’s Masked, both might feel betrayed and misrepresented. The Israeli would worry that the play portrays all Israelis as callous occupiers, who see helicopters, soldiers and tanks as the only solution to difficult problems. Meanwhile, the Palestinian could complain that the play presents Palestinians as selfish activists, who are so frustrated by Israeli occupation that they apply some Middle Eastern derivation of the law of the jungle: each man for himself, against brother and neighbor alike.
David Kaufmann is associate professor of English at George Mason University in Va. See his website here. Kaufman discussed Jewish literature and how postmodern Jewish art might look.
MW: What, if anything, does the term Jewish art mean to you? Do you think there is a such thing as Jewish art above and beyond art made by a Jew or with Jewish content?
DK: This of course is a difficult one because it leads back to the struggle over the definition of Jew and, to a lesser extent, Judaism. I do not know how to limit my view of Jewish art, beyond thinking that it is art made by Jews. But within that, I have chosen—as if I had a choice—to cast as wide a net as possible. I am particularly interested in the various ways that Yiddishkeyt gets worked out and expressed. These ways are often subterranean, secular and to some extent physical—a gesture, a cadence, a turn of affect. Sometimes they are overt.
When readers of the FORWARD write me to berate me that I am too expansive and have diluted the very nature of Judaism, I console myself by remembering that Scholem had an equally expansive view and was of course fascinated—even delighted—by the sheer energy of heresy.
[Film Group] “I mention this film here not so much on its merits as film,” writes Anthony on Homewood Public Library Film Group about Alex Grey’s ARTmind–which he says involves “droning and inarticulate” commentary, which “may be a result of … steady consumption of psychedelics”–but “on its exhilarating visual presentation.”
Juan E. Campo, is associate professor in the religious studies department at UC Santa Barbara. His areas of academic interest include: Islam and culture, comparative study of religions, religion and the culinary cultures of the Middle East, modern pilgrimages (Islamic, Hindu, and Christian), discourses on death and the afterlife and modern Islamic movements. Here is my interview with Campo for my article.
MW: Most American think that it is forbidden to create figurative art under Islamic law. Is that true? To what extend have Muslim artists followed laws with aniconistic positions?
JEC: I do not follow the work of Muslim American artists closely. However there are a number who work in the area of calligraphic art, with modernist aspects.
Figural art is banned particularly in relation to religious contexts (mosques especially) by Sunni legal schools. The Shi’a tend to be much more relaxed about this ban, however, as evidenced by the use of figural representations of Muhammad’s family, the Imams and their companions in Husayniyyas in homes, businesses, and various places of worship. Some Shi’a even wear medallions with images of Ali on them.
[Westmont College] Georges Rouault’s Miserere et Guerre: This Anguished World of Shadows is headed for Reynolds Gallery. The director says, “The faith of Georges Rouault presents the mystery of redemption and its contemporary relevance.”
[All About Kids Magazine] Homeschooling is no excuse to ignore religious art, specifically “Byzantine & Medieval,” which “will explore religious art during the centuries.”
[CHN] Amesterdam’s Museum of Islamic Arts is partnering with Tehran to show Jiroft’s art.
[Qantara] Karim Aga Khan talks about Islamic architecture. “In Islamic architecture you can often sense a spirituality – not only in buildings that serve as houses of worship,” he told Philip Jodidio. HT: Ismaili.
Controversial is the new black in religious art, as evidenced by the recent attention to Cosimo Cavallaro’s Chocolate Jesus, David Cordero’s Obama-Jesus and Maqbool Fida Husain’s depictions of Krishna and Bharat Mata, which the Indian government is calling obscene. But, what can a painting of a gay Jesus mean in light of Leviticus’ declarations that homosexuality is an abomination?
Sometimes, religious art seems to punish itself for the sins of the artistic community. Already banished to the corner out of the public eye, it makes itself even scarcer yet. Steven Erlanger observes one such example in the Israel Museum.
“The Israel Museum is one of the finest in the Middle East — if you can figure out how to get in and find the art,” writes Erlanger in the NY Times. “Yet its entrance is an uninspiring parking lot and ugly ticketing building, and the portal to the actual exhibits is 270 yards away, requiring a hike up a hill, often in the blistering sun. It’s also hard to find your way from one collection to the next.”
On trying to get in to the “modernist temple to culture.” HT: Rick Holton. See his great website here.
[Artdaily] The Kimbell Art Museum will show Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art, which will show “how the early Christians drew upon pagan and Old Testament motifs to express their new faith,” opening on November 18.
[the wayne-o-sphere] “What I’m hoping for are Christians making art good enough to be compelling to people who aren’t looking for ‘Christian art,’” writes Wayne Adams. “Maybe I’m just always looking for interesting Christians making art.”
[Relevant Magazine] “Do the arts really matter? Really?” asks Pastor Win Collier. “A devaluation of art implies there is nothing divinely profound about the reality that our world possesses both zebras and clownfish, both bananas and pomegranates.”
[National Council of Resistance of Iran-Foreign Affairs Committee] “A front organization which is supposed to have promoted Islamic art, in practice it is active in promoting fundamentalism abroad. The organization is receiving more than 10 billion 400 million Tomons (approximately 1.2 million dollars).”
Here is the complete interview with Rebecca M. Brown, from the department of politics and international relations at University of Wales, Swansea, on Islamic art. See her bio here.
MW: I am currently working on a story about Muslim American artists who juxtapose traditional Islamic motifs with American iconography (like iPods and superheroes and NYC metro cards). Is this a developing trend of Muslim American artists mixing symbols of Islam and America, or is it just a few isolated examples?
RB: I don’t think this is anything new, and it’s not limited to Muslim American artists, a term which as you know is problematic for many of the artists themselves.
My area is South Asia, and in that context the symbolic use of US or more broadly Euro-American symbolism in conjunction with South Asian symbolism (connected both with Islam and with other religious traditions) is widespread. The Singh Twins, for example, have for many years employed iconographies of ‘the West’ into their works (including Barbies, Coca-Cola, etc.) painted in styles that rely on Mughal court painting techniques and incorporate Mughal iconographies. As Sikhs (and Britons), this perhaps puts them outside of your question, but I think that most artists of South Asian descent in the diaspora look to a wide range of traditions, not just the religion they are born into. The source for a lot of the mixing of symbolism in South Asia stems from the art school in Lahore, a school founded during the colonial period that has produced several generations of painters trained in the style of the Mughal court (often called miniature, but this is a misnomer). Artists such as Shahzia Sikander were trained there; she has incorporated a wide range of symbols derived from both Islamic and Hindu South Asian
traditions and combined them with her own personal iconographies.
Both of these examples have been working with varying symbologies for years–decades–and so this isn’t really a new trend, at least in terms of the South Asian diaspora.
[The Star (MY)] Azmi Sharon has been to the Islamic Art Gallery to enjoy the “excellent Middle Eastern restaurant” but still considers it one of “certain things that may not impact our lives directly, and yet are still important enough to preserve and protect.”
[Times of India] Dina Wadia, daughter of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, may like it or not, but the Mumbai government is restoring the Jinnah House’s gardens “to reflect the Islamic-Art Deco style, replete with running streams and water fountains.”
[Blue Rat] Some theists say atheism produces bad art, but bluerat writes, “it is not objectively true that atheism produces bad art/music and culture. Though even if it did, that would still not be a reason to believe in God.”
[Pitt. Tribune Review] Tony Zinicola Jr. spent five days driving his 400-pound “nontraditional pieta” from Portland to Pittsburgh in a pickup truck. The trip paid off.
[Between] Jonathan Evens reviews Christian Art by Rowena Loverance. I’m working on my own review of that book, and awaiting responses from Lovernance.
[EURweb] On “Post-Black” and “Post-Jewish” art. Money quote: “Why don’t we call it, Post-Racism Thought? Because we know, just like there is no ‘afterthought’ on black expressionism, there has been no afterthought on racial expressionism. Both are real, and still very relevant.”
(Image) A file picture of Jinnah House, Wikipedia.
Here is my interview with Ori Soltes for my piece on Islamic art.
MW: I am working on an article on Muslim American artists using American iconography (iPods, superheroes, NYC subway maps, etc.) in their works. Do you have any insight into whether this is a new trend or whether it is something that has been going on for a long time in Islamic art (borrowing from other cultures)? To what extent have Muslim artists obeyed laws prohibiting figurative painting?
OS: In reverse order: the prohibition against figurative art is overstated, as it is in the discussion of Jewish art. There have been a zillion figurative images on pottery, carpets and most particularly, illuminated manuscripts–even of Muhammad, and even some where his face is seen (his face is more typically covered by a veil), just not in and around mosques and less common the closer you get, geographically, to Makka and Madina. So, as with Jewish art, it has depended on when and where and therefore on how and by whom the interpretation of proscription and prescription is being made.
[The Rest is Noise] Alex Ross is unconvinced by the story that broke yesterday about Hitler’s taste for music. After all, what’s a handful of Russian records compared to his nearly 400 Wagner records? (See also this NY Times story on musicians during the Nazi era, requires login.)
[NY Times] James Wood is headed to The New Yorker. For a religion angle, I can cite this.
[Jewish Press] Richard McBee writes on Caravaggio And Evil. Money quote: “The enormous empathy one feels for both David and Goliath allows us to see Caravaggio pondering his own image, mourning how the evil that seems so deeply ingrained must be eradicated.”
[BU Arion] Camille Paglia writes on Religion and the Arts in America: “I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion.” Pagila’s article is brilliant, and I need more time to absorb it. HT: Quill and Nail, Evangelical Outpost, Marginal Revolution.
(Image) David with the Head of Goliath (1606), Caravaggio, Galleria Borghese, Rome. JPress.
[SF Chronicle] Donald Fisher (Gap) is offering to build the Contemporary Art Museum of the Presidio with 5,000 more square feet of exhibition space than the SF Museum of Modern Art for his collection of more than 1,000 works. Various suspicious sites like this call Fisher a Jew.
[IHT] Poland refuses “entirely groundless” demands to return German art removed during WWII.
[WIRED Magazine] Gerhard Richter has designed a stained glass window for the Cologne Cathedral using “a mathematical formula to systematically mix permutations of the three primary colors and gray.” (Image WIRED)
My review of Roy Rub’s art is in this week’s Forward. Rub runs Topos Graphics with Seth Labenz, a classmate from Cooper Union. The piece tackles the question of what it means to be a gay, Israeli artist.
I interviewed Mustafa Abu Sway, professor of philosophy and Islamic studies and Al-Quds University in Jerusalem for my recent Arab American News piece. He replied to my interview request with the following:
Dear Menachem,
The only clear element in your enquiry is the question of depicting nudity in artistic form; it is prohibited! You need to be more specific in your questions! Do you talk about human representation (one can detect tolerance if it is educational!) Also, if the human artistic form is incomplete, then some people tolerate it! Divine? (absolutely prohibited since nothing is like unto Him) What sacred and what secular? (There is a new artistic trend that combines Arabic/and abstract forms and or National secular symbols such as the Palestinian flag or the map of historical Palestine)
Sincerely, Mustafa Abu Sway
I had already submitted the piece when Abu Sway got back to me with the comments below.
MW: You say depicting nudity is prohibited. Does the gender of the nude figure matter?
MAS: The gender of the nude is irrelevant. While the whole body of the female should be covered, the male should cover between the navel and the knee. Even when the body is covered, the notion of modesty applies. If the clothing reveals the contours of the body then it is prohibited! Some Muslim women do cover their bodies, but when you see them, the word modesty is not the first one that comes to mind.
MW: Does it matter if the figure is abstracted (Cubist, etc.)? What if it is a cartoon?
MAS: How abstract is abstract? I find Picasso’s Guernica, for example, a powerful work of art. And it strikes me every time I look at it. I can almost hear the people screaming! Nudity is not the issue in the actual time and space. Does the representation of the horror of the moment have to have nudity, in any form? I am inclined to say no! Continue reading ‘Interview: Mustafa Abu Sway’
[New York Post] Maritza Tamayo might decorate her house with “primitive and religious art from Colombia and her husband’s native Peru,” but she’s being canned for trying to turn Unity HS in Manhattan where she is principal into a “Hogwarts wannabe.”
[Orthodoxy Today] Dn. James Bryant writes, “Being a Christian artist does not mean that the artist works only in the realm of religious subject matter … We must perform and create our works in the taverns and among the tax collectors, maintaining our integrity, often where even our overtly expressed point of view is unwelcome.” (Above) “Paul Pletka, Los Hermanos de Sangre, detail. This work is a great mix of biker boy tattoo art and Latino Christian art. It’s too bad it’s situated in a small space where you can’t get back and really study it,” writes roberta on artblog.
And in other news, Harrison Scott Key wonders if good people make good art, Ivan Chan creates a sacred blue hippo, we’ve all known HP is Christian, but here’s another argument and Penn State Students on Holocaust art.
My piece is in the August 4 issue of Arab American News, on what Sharia law has to say about representational art, specifically art that depicts nudity. In the piece, I talk to artists:
Max Emadi Asma Ahmed Shikoh
and Mohamed Zakariya
Professors:
Rebecca M. Brown, professor of politics and international relations at University of Wales, Swansea, Juan E. Campo, associate professor of religious studies at the University of California Santa Barbara, Ori Soltes, professional lecturer in Georgetown’s theology department, Mustafa Abu Sway, professor of philosophy and Islamic studies at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem
and Oleg Grabar, professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Baker Masad, who directs the Amman, Jordan-based Arab Art Gallery.
And last but certainly not least:
Imam Sayed Moustafa al-Qazwini, founding imam of the Islamic Educational Center of Orange County, Calif.
and Imam Yahya Hendi, Muslim chaplain at Georgetown University.
Schaeffer is quite right to point out that there was a lot of art in the temple, which God commanded. I am not sure he is right that there is secular work (he cites flowers, oxen, etc.), because those are all religious symbols as well, but his point that the Bible cannot be anti-art seems correct. What remains to be proven, in my mind, is that the art of the temple is important theologically. Schaeffer says of the stones of the temple:
The temple was covered with precious stones for beauty. There was no pragmatic reason for the precious stones. They had no utilitarian purpose. God simply wanted beauty in the temple. God is interested in beauty. (26)
That being said, I imagine most of the people who went to the temple did not admire the beauty of the architecture, just as most tourists today do not care for art. One can only guess that the Jews living in the time of the temple were no artsier as a people than we are today; certainly, they were ill-educated former slaves–and probably even illiterate. So whereas I am convinced that art is important in its own right, and specifically in the context of religion, I am not yet convinced that it necessarily played an important religious role to the people who were not Bezalel and Moses.
[Christianity Today] The Pope will pause for five minutes at a Holocaust memorial in Austria.
[Christian Post] “Operation Jericho” might not have a prayer with customs officials.
[Religion News Blog] It’s on its way to the UK, please welcome Jihad the Musical (see video).
"Iconia has been on my blogroll from the very beginning" -Sincerae
Iconia
Iconia is a blog about religion and art by Menachem Wecker.
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Iconia is part of the Canonist network of religion blogs.
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