My review of Idol Anxiety at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum appears in the Forward (link here). Here’s a selection:
Most of the works that appear in the exhibit Idol Anxiety, at the University of Chicago’s David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, feature Christian and pagan content. But exhibit curator Aaron Tugendhaft credits the “heightened awareness” he developed from studying the Talmud as a child with helping him discover “valuable distinctions not seen by others” in the process of how objects avoid becoming idols.
On the work of Meinrad Craighead, 72, who says, “From the beginning, I had a safe container in which to dream, inside the arms of my mother and my grandmother and then out into the imagery of the Catholic church.” Craighead also talks about connecting to the Mother rather than “the remote ‘Father’ I was educated to have faith in.”
Says Calvin Carter of the boy in his painting Texas Baptism, who stands “waist deep in an impossibly deep puddle.” Article and image of Carter in front of the painting: The Jasper Newsboy.
Jon Weece, senior minister at Southland Christian Church in Lexington, Kentucky, is a great preacher, who regularly tackles important material with an accessible approach and a sense of humor.
In the recent series, “Seriously?!” Southland’s former senior minister Mike Breaux pinch-hit for Weece on the topic of “some of the more unusual phrases in the Bible,” particularly, Jesus’ instruction to “Eat My flesh.” (E.g. here, verse 54.)
Breaux’s talk was compelling, and one of my favorite parts of his sermon was when he talked about the Etch A Sketch he keeps in his office (next to a Tupperware ball) to remind him of how he hands the scribbles of his life to God, who returns a clean slate. What a great religious art metaphor! (You can read more about the toy in his book Identity Theft on Google Books here, page 159.)
But Breaux also said something about Jews, particularly rabbis, that is simply not true, and I think it’s important to point this out.
You know how some parents think their children are simply perfect, and though you want to tell them their kids are great, but not that great, you think it’s really sweet that they take such pride in their kids? Religious people should feel that sense of pride about their God (or Gods); it’s what you are supposed to feel if you are a person of faith. But when that pride comes at the cost of putting down others, it’s important to step back and wipe off the boundary between propaganda and religion.
Breaux turns to John chapter four to discuss Jesus’ unique ministry to a “a woman of Samaria” at a well in Sychar. Breaux praises Jesus for addressing the “really broken” woman, “even though Jewish rabbis were not supposed to speak to Samaritans, they were not supposed to speak to Samaritan women, or women in general in public.” Yet, Jesus talked to this one, “because he knew she was broken … he was always breaking rules, in fact they weren’t really rules, they were just barriers people had put up.”
Perhaps Breaux knew of the passage from Ethics of the Fathers that states, “One who speaks excessively with a woman brings evil upon himself, neglects the words of the Torah, and will go to hell.” (See here, number 5.) But frankly, I’m not so sure he knew the reference, and if he did he’d know to dig a bit deeper. The Talmud is packed with references to rabbis counseling women, and intelligent readers would know not to confuse the sense of modesty in Jewish scripture with any kind of censorship of coed conversations. There is just no reason for this cheap shot at Jews in an otherwise great sermon (save another reference to Jews as “spiritually blind”) and the audience deserved better.
Even as one rabbi says it is scarce in today’s major religions, idolatry is “far more widespread than one may think” among Catholics, and a rabbi tells a kid to tear up an idolatrous photograph in a new film.
The Republican running on an “anti-Sharia” platform tells FrontPage:
Our education system is bankrupt at all levels. Our universities do not prepare our young minds to see anything bad about Islam. Here in Nashville at Vanderbilt University you can get a degree in Islamic Studies and never read the life of Mohammed—and never read the entire Koran. You study Sufi poetry, Islamic art and Islamic history viewed as a glorious triumph. No kafirs suffer in this program and there is no history of Jew, Christian, Hindu or Buddhist suffering under Islamic rule for the past 1,400 years. A graduate from this program then goes out into the world professionally trained to be an apologist for Islam, a dhimmi. And this program is standard at all schools, not just Vanderbilt.
In the churches, the artifacts are alive … Putting them behind glass would take them out of their environment. It would be like putting them in a museum.
And “They don’t offer postmodern commentary or opinion about the artwork of the past and the beliefs that inspired them,” says Infused Knowledge. “What the Getty does in their displays is to tell you about the people who produced the religious art or made use of it, and what they believed. Period.”
As the Semester Turns on “Wild Hare Students,” who “post wild things as facts, and get upset if you correct the misinformation”:
WHS did not get the concept that early Christianity and modern Christianity differ, sometimes quite widely. They kept complaining that early Christian art pieces were “wrong” and “didn’t understand the Bible” and other such … interesting commentaries. Explaining who Monophysites were and what they believed didn’t seem to phase WHS. The were just wrong, and that was it. Besides, they claimed to know all about Monnophisits.
The diplomat and founder of Ottawa’s National Arts Centre was Anglican but “was thinking the same thoughts as a Catholic or a Jew or a Muslim” and felt “The soul is a more important part of our being than character.”
Report David Usborne for the Independent (UK) and Martin Bailey for The Art Newspaper. Edna Russmann, a curator at the museum, went public with the news and hopes her admission will lead other to “re-evaluate Coptic art.”
Usborne explains that Coptic art is “Christian imagery in limestone from Egypt dating between the late fourth century and AD641.”
The Wiki page adds, “Coptic art displays a mix of native Egyptian and Hellenistic influences. Subjects and symbols were taken from both Greek and Egyptian mythology, sometimes altered to fit Christian beliefs. Persia and Syria also influenced Coptic art, though to a lesser extent, leaving images such as the peacock and the griffin.”
Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava in front of the bridge he built in Jerusalem, which is supposed to symbolize King David’s harp:
Bridges are instruments of peace.They join places that were separated. They permit people to meet.They even are meeting points.They are done for the sake of progress and for the average citizen.They even have a religious dimension. The word religious comes from Latin, meaning “creating a link.”
This particular understanding has a very deep meaning,especially in Jerusalem,which contains in its name the words shalom,salaam,peace. A bridge makes a lot of sense in a city like Jerusalem.
Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov (born Garry Weinstein) is asking Russians to save a museum which memorializes Andrei Sakharov. The museum is controversial for showing an exhibit in March 2007 called “Forbidden Art” which took on religious fundamentalism and which offended Orthodox Christians.
“God has acted in history and entered into our sensible world, so that it may become transparent to him. Images of beauty, in which the mystery of the invisible God become visible, are an essential part of Christian worship. There will always be ups and downs in the history of iconography, upsurge and decline, and therefore periods when images are somewhat sparse. But they can never be totally lacking. Iconoclasm is not a Christian option.”
Thus, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in Spirit of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), pp. 131-132. Quoted on The Charcoal Fire.
With the Spertus Museum’s recent “censorship” of its exhibit of Holy Land maps, it is especially nice to see that famous (and autistic) artist Stephen Wiltshire has drawn Jerusalem.
One blog says Wiltshire also wants to draw Tel Aviv, and quotes: “Jerusalem was the hardest city I’ve ever encountered to draw. There are many tiny details that are without architectural order or reason.”
This is part of a larger tradition of Holy Land mapping, that includes Bünting’s 1581 clover-leaf Jerusalem, famous for casting the city as the center of the world. Other artists have included New and Old Testament scenes or the “Templum Salomonis” (like von Breydenbach does) in their maps, juxtaposing the old and the new.
Wiltshire’s is surely more helpful for tourists than Bünting’s symbolic map, but the clover does show how artists tend to create the Holy Land in their own image, which is perhaps where Spertus encountered its troubles. Kudos to Wiltshire for creating a non-partisan view.
See Wiltshire draw Rome in the YouTube video below.
