Iconia has moved
January 13th, 2010 by Menachem Wecker
I may come back to visit, but for now, Iconia has moved to the Houston Chronicle. Check it out at http://blogs.chron.com/iconia/.
Archive for January, 2010
Link on About.com
January 9th, 2010 by Menachem Wecker
I’m delighted to see that my article on David Levine is linked on About.com’s art history blog.
Interview: Kate Shellnutt, web producer, religion blogger, Houston Chronicle
January 9th, 2010 by Menachem Wecker
I first connected with Kate Shellnutt on Twitter (where she has two handles). I was very excited to be a part of her article “This Muslim-American life: Allah and the Arts,” which she wrote as a journalism student at Medill. Shellnutt has since graduated and now works on the Houston Chronicle’s religion page, where she continues to write on many of the topics which are most important to me. It was obvious that I had to formally interview here, and I think readers might find particular relevance and insight in her view of the role of religion reporters.
MW: Was there a particular experience or revelatory moment when you first decided covering religion was your passion?
KS: I don’t have a crazy story. I’ve wanted to be a journalist since I was little, and majored in journalism and religion in college (Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va.). I’ve spent most of my life very curious about religion and very concerned about religion, but without strong ties to a single tradition. Studying and covering religion has given me the opportunity to explore a spectrum of beliefs. I have the chance see how different people experience the sacred, which in the end, is the most magical, special, meaningful thing we get to do.
MW: What is a day in the life of a web producer and blogger for the Houston Chronicle’s religion site like?
KS: Several times a day, I check up on religion news online: blogs, mainstream sites, religion-specific sites, organization reports and releases. I look for stories to localize, get background information and note any trends. I meet with religious leaders and attend events in the area to cover on the site. I also manage our team of pastor and reader bloggers, offering suggestions and helping promote their work on the chron.com site. And, what seems to be my least-fun job, I patrol our forums and comments for hateful and offensive remarks.
MW: What are some of the unique challenges and opportunities for religion writers?
KS: If you’re a religion writer, in many ways, you are THE expert in the room on matters of faith. The average person, even among the educated, doesn’t have impressive levels of religion knowledge and rarely has any helpful knowledge outside of their own tradition. I see the role of religion journalists to encourage their newsrooms to consider the religion angle on all sorts of stories, because it’s often helpful and relevant, but not the obvious way to go. They can help organizations deepen their coverage of everyday topics. Just this week, I’ve found religion angles to stories about Texas football, national politics the weather and celebrity gossip. The audience for mainstream news includes a great number of people of faith, and we underserve them if we don’t consider this dimension of life in our coverage.
MW: How seriously do you think religion reporters are taking religious art? Do they tend to view it as a source for soft, feel-good stories, or are religion newsrooms seriously considering religious culture as potentially news?
KS: Just this morning Houston’s Belief section in the paper led with a religion and art story. This story, as a profile of a local church and its artwork, is more feature-like; it’s not merely fluff, but not incredibly in-depth, simply a local look. I think most religion and art stories you see are either like this or on the other end of the spectrum, the controversial piss-cross kind of stories. I’d like to see art and religion stories that better explain how the art relates to the tradition, rather than just pointing at the phenomenon, like “look at that, it’s Jewish/Muslim/Christian!”
MW: Do you think there has been a tendency lately to focus on the negative side of religious art in the press (Danish cartoons, chocolate Jesus, etc.)? If so, is that because religious artists aren’t pitching their stories well enough, or is it the fault of religious press?
KS: Yes. Controversy, juxtaposition, the unexpected certainly get more attention, but that’s the case with almost all news. People are still desperate to know and learn, but they don’t necessarily want to spend time with long essays that don’t draw them in from the start. Religion reporters, like all reporters, must consider the audience and present topics in exciting, creative ways that make people want to click and read.
MW: What are some of your favorite examples of religious art? Favorite religious artists?
KS: Ok, so I did do the mandatory European art history kind of course in college, and I’ve studied in Italy, touring the museums and churches in Rome and Florence… but that’s not really the kind of religious art that turns me on.
Rather than art that depicts religious events or is commissioned by a church or includes religious symbols, I like when artists create work in a way that reflects their religious tradition. I met an artist in Chicago who was inspired by her Jewish roots. Ellen Gradman (Twitter) makes large, multimedia colleges, sculptures and environments using found objects. In the creation of her work, she’s putting pieces together, acting out the Jewish notion of “tikkun olam,” which is a notion that Jews have the responsibility to serve the broken world they live in and rebuild it piece by piece. What a deep, and almost literal, way to put religion into action, I thought. Plus her work was beautiful! (I haven’t told her this, but even her little Twitter logo reminds me of the logo for Tikkun Daily.)
Peter Krausz’s “(No) Man’s Land” at Forum Gallery
January 6th, 2010 by Menachem Wecker
My review of the Canadian, Jewish artist appears in The Jewish Press.
Mesorah D.C.: Parshat “Vayechi”
January 4th, 2010 by Menachem Wecker
This post is part of a feature of critical responses to sermons by religious leaders.
I wanted to share an interesting sermon that the rabbi at Mesorah D.C. delivered this past Friday night. The rabbi doesn’t seem to post his sermons, so I am keeping him anonymous.
The rabbi began by noting that the weekly portion, which begins at Genesis 47: 28, features a peculiar layout.
Most portions start off with one of two different sorts of indentations, but this portion is not immediately accessible when one scans the Torah scroll. (More info here.)
The rabbi connected the unusual layout with what he said was a biblical statement that Jacob tried to reveal to his sons when the Messiah would arrive (it is clear from here that it is a quote from Rashi not from the bible).
Why, wondered the rabbi, did the bible record that Jacob tried to reveal the Messianic arrival date if he failed? (Obviously the easy answer is the Torah did not ever claim that; Rashi did.) He connected the attempt with a question as to why the portion, when it says Jacob lived in Egypt for 17 years, used the word “vayechi” (from which the root “chai” comes) instead of the more regular “vayeshev” to mean “he lived.” (When I asked him about all the references in Genesis 5 to people living, using the root “chai,” he said the difference was “vayeshev” is usually used when the verse specifies where the character lives.)
The rabbi then cited the Zohar, which, according to him, says that Jacob was living the best years of his life in Egypt. One wonders, though, why Jacob’s life was just getting better and better when he told Pharaoh just verses earlier in Genesis 47:9, “The years of my life are 130 years — few and evil were the days of the years of my life, and they didn’t reach the days of the years of my fathers in their travels.” It would seem to me that Jacob was probably not a very happy person at the moment.
The rabbi somehow related all this to a parable. Declaring the kugel at the bottom of the pot to be the most tasty, the rabbi said a queen would never ask to be served that part of the dish, because it was beneath her honor. The queen would instead, the rabbi speculated, ask a servant to get it for her on the sly. Evidently, this somehow relates the “hidden-ness” of the beginning of the Torah portion and the way the ability to tell his sons when he would die evaded Jacob.
Email and RSS feed news roundup 1/3
January 3rd, 2010 by Menachem Wecker
It’s a “truly exciting time: for contemporary Iranian and Middle Eastern art, at least according to this.
Image on the right: a Chagall recently acquired by a Jewish museum in London. I’m not sure why the NY Times piece declares so assuredly that Chagall’s use of the crucifixion motif was “is used as a metaphor for persecuted Jewry.” I’m also curious, given the quality of the piece, that there is no discussion about its provenance or authenticity.
RIP Robert Smith, 81, president and trustee of the National Gallery of Art, who was also very involved in Jewish philanthropy. WaPo obituary.
A great post on Pastor Rick Warren and church fund raising, the media.
A Catholic priest, who “long ago discarded his clerical collar in favor of a painter’s smock.”
“In Jewish thought, art is about the spiritual beauty and the essence it embodies. The external is only a way to exalt the inner spirit. And, of course, beauty brings the viewer to a higher dimension,” says Rabbi Yonah Weinrib, who, as you can see from viewing his work in the video below, is unfairly compared to Chagall and van Gogh in the lead paragraph.
Lon Solomon: “People Jesus Met, part 28 — The Wedding in Cana (Full Obedience)”
January 2nd, 2010 by Menachem Wecker
This post is part of a feature of critical responses to sermons by religious leaders.
In Lon Solomon’s 12/13/09 sermon (audio, video), the lead pastor at McLean Bible errs in his analysis of the story of Noah, and offers what is unfortunately a regular feature in his otherwise thought-provoking sermons: a hateful, snide comment about rabbis. He also talks about how God told him to become lead pastor at McLean.
Though “every American child, just about, has heard of Noah and his ark,” Solomon begins, what made Noah a great man wasn’t that people know about him, nor that people have toys that look like him, but that the bible honors him as “one of the greatest men ever to live.”
Solomon mentions that Isaiah (see Isaiah 54:9 to see that this isn’t a positive reference), Peter (see here), Ezekiel (see here) and “the Lord Jesus himself” cast Noah in a positive light. Solomon also cites Hebrews 11, which he calls “the Bible’s spiritual hall of fame, the Cooperstown of the Bible.”
“There’s old Noah, big as life, and what was it that the Bible applauds Noah for above everything else? Well folks, it was for his full obedience to God.”
According to Solomon, the Bible tells us Noah had never seen rain and had no empirical proof that a flood was coming. “Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Noah obeyed God,” Solomon would have us believe. After discussing the wedding at Cana, Solomon (starting about 11:30 into the clip) adds, “What made Noah the spiritual giant that he was, what caused the Bible to applaud him and put him into the hall of fame, was his full obedience to God. What God told him to do Noah did. He did it fully, and he did it completely, and he did it without compromise.”
Indeed, the passage Solomon quotes, Hebrews 11:7, states, “By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.”
The trouble is that Solomon neglects another important Old Testament passage, Genesis 7:7 (Hebrew), “And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood” (emphasis mine).
The medieval commentator Rashi has noted that Noah entered the ark not because he was faithful even without empirical proof of the flood, but because the waters pushed him in. “Even Noah was one of those who is short of faith,” Rashi writes, “he sometimes believes and sometimes does not believe that the flood would come. And he did not enter the ark until the waters forced him.”
Elsewhere in his sermon (19:55 ff), Solomon discusses God’s reasons for stripping Saul of his kingship and replacing him with David. “Friends, in God’s mind, partial obedience is no obedience,” he says. What then of Noah’s partial obedience? How does Solomon explain the Genesis verse that Noah actually entered the ark because of the empirical evidence that promised a watery grave if he did not shut himself up in his boat?
Of course, the Hebrews verse says Noah started building the ark out of faith — since the flood had not come yet — but that can co-exist with the OT statement that what actually drove Noah into the ark wasn’t his faith in God, but actually meteorological evidence that a flood was beginning. (The Rockwell image on the right comes to mind.)
Surely, Solomon need not respond to every biblical verse in every sermon, but starting at 14:01, he says in a different context, “Well friends, every nincompoop can get this one right. I mean even those rabbis can get this one right.” In that light, I will say, friends, every school child who has studied the Hebrew bible knows Genesis 7:7. And especially the lead pastor at a mega church, who fancies himself an expert on the Hebrew Bible, should get this one right.
Image: The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark by Jan Brueghel the Elder, 1613. Getty Museum.