A Talmudic scholar, introduced to me via email by the son of a Pentecostal minister, told me that it is no coincidence the first Christian church devoted to veneration of the Virgin Mary was built in Ephesus.
I'm sure they didn't. I am also intrigued by the fact that certain Old Testament references to the 'gods of other nations' that many Hebrews turned from their God to worship included "the Queen of Heaven." Of course that was a KJV translation. I don't go for a hard-line Calvinist or atheist interpretation that the RCC is worshiping idols. I grew up in a Catholic neighborhood, and I have a good friend from high school who is a Catholic priest. I find doctrine and dogma often get in the way, and produce factional disputes that are entirely avoidable if we remember that "Now we see through a glass darkly." There is a human need to have a feminine side to worship, and since we have only one God, it has to be found in other ways.
Our Brooklyn neighborhood abounded in garden statues of the Virgin Mary. My father spent a good deal of time building a whole grotto for Mom’s statue that now resides with me after my sister sold her house and they moved into an apartment in Brooklyn.
The feminine principle in Catholicism (along with the cult of the saints) does in fact approach polytheism as my Protestant friends claim, but it does so asymptotically (veneration, not worship, a distinction worthy of debate but not to me) never actually reaching the tipping point, except in popular pieties that are not to be dismissed out of hand.
For years I was a grateful student of the Talmud, in a Talmud Study Group, invited by a close friend and political ally in Brooklyn who became ba'al teshuvah (a revert to his Jewish faith). He invited me because I had all sorts of Jewish texts from college theology classes that were helpful in his “journey home” (as the great Marcus Grodi calls it). It was among the greatest intellectual experiences of my life. Anyway, we touched briefly, on occasion, on topics related to the Kabbalah and it was interesting to see the feminine principle in Judaism.
As I remember it, the “Shekhinah” is the divine feminine aspect of God, representing God's nurturing qualities, immanence, and dwelling within the world.
Another thing I learned from the Talmudic scholar is that the woman (isha) was made by taking one SIDE of the Adam (the original human who was androgynous), and what was left became the man (isha). The man is not the same thing as Adam, and the woman is not the same thing as Eve. When an English translation says "son of man" (which occurs in the Old Testament as well as in the Gospels) the original reads ben-Adam. God is not, strictly speaking a male figure, male and female represent different aspects of the image of God, and marriage reunites the Adam. (Which is why in Orthodox Jewish teaching, same-sex attraction just isn't the same thing).
I like the idea in orthodoxy of the saints replacing the fallen angels of nations and places although as an Anglican I don’t particularly venerate saints. I have started praying the Angelus a lot though. I can see that the mother of God replacing the temple of Artemis is something of that nature.
You might better pray that Saudi Arabia be converted to Orthodox Christianity. I expect the Orthodox church has a better chance of reaching a Muslim population than any other branch of Christian faith. After all, there are a lot of Orthodox in the middle east already, and Protestant theology (or liturgy) simply would not compute.
I’ve always thought that conservative Protestantism is closer to Islam than any orthodox Christianity, and indeed that the Reformers were substantially motivated by Muslim envy, the last time Islam was knocking on Vienna’s door. Eastern Orthodoxy is the most iconographic of all Christianities, for one thing.
I think the fact that these idiotic, bottom-feeding liberals keep thinking art in the vein of "Piss Christ" is compelling is, paradoxically, proof of how powerful Christianity remains in the Western psyche.
After all, if the cross had no power, why would these moral imbeciles need to rebel against it?
The mode of their rebellion is also informative. A true refutation of Christian symbolism would be to create symbolism (statues and art) that contradicts it, but is equally compelling and beautiful (or moreso). But that is not what we're seeing. These people reveal the limits of their vision and ability in the childish and predictable form their rebellion takes. "Piss Christ" is the ceiling for them.
I visited Andres Serrano’s apartment in Manhattan with some other art friends years ago. It’s full of reclaimed cathedral furniture, and the walls are all clad with stone from old churches.
The man himself was surprisingly generous, and I left feeling like his work was a warped longing for a transcendence he wanted so much to touch, but had somehow lost access to.
The trouble with so much contemporary art, for ages and ages now, is that it holds criticality as its core dogmatic position, and that at some point, that saw cuts off the branch on which the artist perches.
The trouble with Christian art is that it’s far too often either pedantic, hackneyed, or simply nonexistent.
There is some value in the complex abstract and symbolic languages uncovered in the 19th & 20th century, but that value must be reassessed and offered up in sacrifice to God to be fully realized.
If we don’t, it’s endless recursions of cheap blasphemy like the above.
Also, try pulling off any of this childish priggery with images of Mohammed.
I think there do exist forms of media that wrestle with the enormous legacy of Christianity in a heteredox and modern way, while not being defamatory, embiterred or subtly demonic.
The example that pops into mind is Tom Holland's book Dominion and its cover, Salvador Dali's painting of Christ ("Christ of Saint John of the Cross"). I don't think the depiction of Dali is in any sense orthodox, but what I see there is a modern and secular mind trying to wrestle with Christianity.
What Dali "meant" with it can be debated, but what I see is a modern artist impressed and compelled by the crucifixion. However, he gets this vibe across using very modern visual language. The backdrop of Christ on that painting appears to be the void of space, the setup of the image is evocative of gravity. Whether it is respectful of Christianity or traditional forms can be debated, but I don't detect any malice or anti-Christian spite from that image.
Dali did eventually return to Christ after years of questing. And Dali was a prodigious talent and thinker too - even when he was an atheist he was never a total cynic.
Did you know he also penned a novel? He wrote it during WWII, and it is much like many earlier Russian and French grand novels, an story of many different interlocking lives spanning the pre-war years, through WWII, and into what he imagined post-war France would become. It's an odd book, but even that I would say is Christ-haunted. It was recently reprinted (I think for the first time since the late 70s?). It's called "Hidden Faces".
These are interesting bits of info, thanks! Surrealism itself was generally anti-iconic and anti-meaning, and very much opposed to traditional meaning, eg. Christianity. Nice to know that Christ reached even Dali in the end!
Dali did some great Catholic art (and some weird stuff). His most famous might be "Christ of Saint John of the Cross," which I really love--look for a good reproduction, the perspective is fantastic, and it's as if you're like a bullet shooting down from the Cross overlooking the world.
Jonathan Pageau covered a lot of this in his recent talk at the Touchstone Conference this year. If "criticality" or (more bluntly) Rebellion is at the core of what you allow to be "art" (not to mention artistic ego), then when you run out of things to tear down, you have nothing left but pure junk. You have nothing left to criticize and only a cynical rejection of any attempt to make or create anything.
Criticality is, in the end, nothing more than another form of parasitism.
I remember this talk, may rewatch. The only issue I often take with Pageau, and I may be oversimplifying his stance, is that he often seems to want to throw the whole enterprise of contemporary art under the bus.
I do think there are things that can be gleaned from some corners, particularly minimalism, light and space, and other movements that at least grasp (however weakly) at the numinous.
In a recent interview, Serrano said he was hurt by those who said he was anti-Christian: “I was brought up in Christianity, I am part of the church, and I feel connected to a long tradition of Christian artists working with the faith’s symbols.”
I've never liked "Piss Christ" but noticed over the years that Serrrano's defenders were much more vocal in their denunciation of Christianity than what would be expected from the artist. Serrano was always a bit more circumspect.
I actually do think the cross has little power today, with the caveat that I grew up in a secular family in an intensely secular part of the United States (the northeast), so it’s possible I’m simply being parochial.
That said, whether the cross is still a symbol worth attacking or not, I must agree whole heartedly that these artists are predictable, childish and uninspired.
Travel down the road a bit to central Pennsylvania, also a part of the Northeast. There you will find an ongoing and strong series of Christian communities, once you get outside of the Philadelphia suburbs.
The Penn family had seeded the belt of territory along the disputed border with Catholic Maryland with Presbyterians, Anabaptists, and so on as a kind of immunization policy. A lot of those people are still there.
The cross has power because it haunts secular people, because it's always there at the origin of social phenomena. So many secular trends and ideologies are either offshoots of Christianity, rebellions against it, or both. As just one example, consider how modern sexuality is best understood as a rebellion and reversal of traditional Christian sexuality.
Regular seculars don't understand this in the fully articulated and verbalized way of Tom Holland (of "Dominion") and Rod. Instead, it exists in their minds latently and subconsciously. It haunts them, sometimes drawing them towards the church (when standing in a cathedral) or repelling them away from it.
Some seculars, low on wisdom and high in self-admiration, grow agitated that they still exist in Christianity's shadow. These people normally base their identities on being brazenly "modern" and want to exorcise the shadow of the cross in an act of juvenile rebellion. "Piss Christ" is the embodiment of these efforts.
The reason the "Piss Christ" is pathetic is that it can never achieve its goal. Just like a teenager yelling at his parents doesn't undo his parents' defining influence in his life, a self-absorbed artist defaming his own cultural roots doesn't undo the fact that they are his roots.
I don't know what Serrano was trying to say with that work, but one message that comes across to me when I see it (I don't seek it out) is that most people - perhaps also some Christians (our history is very messy) - still revile Jesus and/or pay him no more mind than they pay their ejected bodily fluids. For some people, that may be intentional, even angry, rejection. For others, it may be something completely without thought or questioning introspection. For others, it may be taking Jesus for granted, however that is done. To me, it's a cautionary message: am I holding Jesus in contempt, in spite of what I say, through the way I live my life? Am I a "functional atheist"?
I was thinking of the piss Christ controversy (when Giuliani was mayor), Sarhaddon. There is an incredible essay written by David Bentley Hart (back in his First Things days) called “Christ and Nothing” that sums up how thoroughly Christianity is subsumed into our culture.
The man who did "Piss Christ" insisted that he was trying to make a statement about the commercialization of religion. He may have had a point. He didn't make it very well, if that was his point. The large point at the time was, do we really need to expend public funds to provide a grant that supports an artist for the rather limited effort of depositing a crucifix into a beaker of urine, and then take a picture of it? One expects rather more for one's money.
The problem with his explanation is that if he was trying to criticize commercialization of Christianity from a Christian vantage point, there would be many other ways to make that point.
I don't know too much about him, but this makes him seem like a twisted individual who lapsed in and out of loving and hating the church, coming up with excuses to cope with this dilemma.
Jesus Christ did not call His priests to be lukewarm. He said plainly:
“Because you are neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth” (Rev. 3:16).
When bishops praise what desecrates the Cross,
they do not show compassion — they show cowardice.
If the sacred is not worth defending,then what exactly is your vocation for?When priests cheer blasphemy,they do not reveal sophistication —
they reveal spiritual collapse.
Vienna once built cathedrals that lifted souls to Heaven.
Now clergy stand smiling as Christ is dragged into the gutter.
It is not the world’s mockery that wounds us most — it is the silence of those ordained to defend the holy.
A shepherd afraid to speak for Christ is not a shepherd.
Christ deserves defenders, not curators of blasphemy.
I hope someone writes the ultimate story on how the Jesuits could have drifted so far from the time St. Ignatius formed men who would rather die than allow Christ to be mocked.
St. Michael the Archangel — defend us in this battle.
I've spent some time in German-speaking countries, and my impression is that priests there - more than in the anglosphere - tend to regard themselves as part of the intellectual and cultural elite. Hence their simpering response to this kind of thing; it's terror of being thought unsophisticated and crude - "dumpf" as the Germans might say - by the people who matter.
Many priests, and certainly bishops, were from the ruling classes in times past, so they were always part of the elite, catering to the people who matter. Priests from peasant or craft families were climbing -- trying to get a foot on the ladder to become part of the ruling classes, even if they couldn't leave it to children they weren't supposed to have.
Very good. When I refer to the Catholic hierarchy I refer to them as “hirelings,” eagerly awaiting their next junket to wherever the USCCB meets.
Benedict knew this and his reference to a new, tiny Church did not necessarily mean that the ancient superstructures would disappear. They may continue, surviving as just another NGO, an ornament to the estanlishment, its leaders invited to all the right parties. A schism? No, more like an ember lying still beneath the ashes.
“We know now that the modern world is coming to an end . . . at the same time, the unbeliever will emerge from the fogs of secularism. He will cease to reap benefit from the values and forces developed by the very Revelation he denies . . . Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world, but the more precious will be that love which flows from one lonely person to another . . . the world to come will be filled with animosity and danger, but it will be a world open and clean.”
- Romano Guardini, ‘The End of the Modern World’
“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He who is a hireling and not a shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. He flees because he is a hireling and cares nothing for the sheep. I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me…”
Well said! We must be Fierce Everyday Warriors for God’s truth. We cannot expect non-believers to follow God’s way, but surely we can expect bishops, etc. to uphold God’s truth and stand for what is good and pure and excellent and praise worthy.
My God. And most especially this: // From the exhibition website (notice the remarks by a bishop and by a Jesuit, who is the rector of Vienna’s Jesuit parish //
Rod, there is no good reason for hope, is there? Our cultural, political, money, and religious masters have all gone happily and smugly depraved.
God has His elect in every season, and in every branch of the Church. The leadership may have fallen, but there are faithful Catholic believers in Vienna who are horrified by this crap, and devoted to seeking God.
The gates of hell had not prevailed when half of Europe peeled off into bloody schism. The German church is in big trouble but the Church is large and the pope has not taught heresy.
You can argue there is theological schism in the RCC, and that Francis did teach heresy. IMHO the biblical unity we are to strive for is in theological truth, not merely institutional unity.
It’s certainly possible to argue that but I sincerely don’t see how you can make the argument go through. Did he toy repeatedly with teaching heresies to which he was visibly personally tempted, in a scandalous way? Certainly. But it seems clear to me that even Francis knew what would happen if he tried to firmly lay down that, say, divorce and remarriage is sometimes fine now. (Well, the Orthodox aren’t in theological unity on that one anyway…so, say gay sex, then.)
A Google search will turn up a lot of serious heresy allegations about Francis, from Catholics. Saying 'who am I to judge' gays and appointing those squishy on the issue come to mind, the Borgia popes never tried to cast doubt on such a settled issue.
As I said, I hardly think a verbal comment in an interview which is very easy to square with the Catechism, as much as it caused understandable concern and was probably not well-chosen, can be seriously treated as the throne of Peter formally teaching heresy. Nobody thinks the Holy Spirit protects the Pope from all error or failure!
I'm not particularly religious, but it seems to me that a culture that would do this to the faith that served as the basis FOR the culture will ultimately get what it deserves. I don't know what type of world these artists think they are "building" - they build nothing at all, they only destroy.
The worst thing about it is that it is, and has been since Piss Christ, CHEAP. Nobody is going to suffer, well, not now, anyway, for this dime-store transgression. In fact, it's a plus. And Bishops say, have at it, boys. I wonder if Dr. Bob might have an opinion on +Glettler's promotion of this pile of shit. And yes we'll get it, hot and strong, any day now.
The $64K question is, Will any of it sell? Or will it molder away in some warehouse after a brief day in the sun? Years ago I went to art gallery opening because the place was owned by an acquaintance. The art displayed there was the stuff of drug trips and nightmares after too many chili dogs and onion rings. One piece features a tree that was turning into a nest of barbed wire against a gray-black sky. The artist saw me looking at it and asked me what I thought of it. I had to bite my tongue not to reply "Oh, that would look great in a torture chamber". That art gallery lasted six weeks and then closed.
I take your point, but it's subsidized by gallery owners, curators, and in addition these loathsome creatures flit from resident artist job to resident artist job to teaching positions. But it's not the point. To mess up the head of a child, to epater the bourgeois, to get the approval of their fellow freaks, that's reward enough.
The there is the "art" some friends were sharing about on social media a year or two ago: a banana taped to a blank white wall with grey duct tape, being ooed and ahhed over by patrons of some gallery or museum.
There is a line in Mary Renault's. "The King Must Die" where Theseus writes to his father that the Cretans are ripe for conquest, they have become like children.
It’s interesting that this stuff is seen as transgressive ( and since it’s pretty bad by any standard that is its purported value because it’s not about what it is but what it says) . Yet , there is no risk to it and what in our age is really transgressed.
TC is still in effect, yes, but he gave permission for the Tridentine Mass to be said at St Peter’s within his first few months as Pope. By a Cardinal, Burke, who was in Francis’s crosshairs for years. I mean, I’m no Pope whisperer, but don’t you think that speaks volumes? Ted, I think you want a lot of “sit anathemas” and that’s not how it is going to play out.
The Pope doesn't have authority over a secular art gallery. He could ban showing this stuff in church facilities of course, and I can't see why he wouldn't. He could also excommunicate the artist, but I doubt the artist is communicant in the first place.
True. I missed that bishops were actively promoting it. Although the First Amendment has no jurisdiction in Austria, as an American I note that one component of First Amendment jurisprudence is that if a dispute on matters of faith and doctrine enters a civil court case, courts are to accept the pronouncement of the highest judicatory body of any relevant church as the final word. Courts have no authority to question that, in matters internal to the church.
This art will shortly be forgotten, because it says nothing, does nothing and is worth nothing. It’s cheap mockery at best, and cringeworthy boorishness at worst.
I'm not even a Christian and I find this "art" grotesque. Just because one has an imagination, one does not have to put every aspect of this imagination to paint and canvas.It's a short step to paintings depicting cannibalism, rape, assorted forms of human degradation, etc.
I’ve got a buddy who thinks he’s an artist, but artfully denies it. He’s very much into the entire poststructuralist theoretical world. His latest idea is that the greatest work of art would be the extinction of the human species. I haven’t read through all his stuff recently, but I imagine it’s filled with sophisticated references to many and sundry well-known philosophical notions going all the way back. He’s not ignorant. But he is nihilistic. He turns 70 this year and has an odd penchant for marking off biblically important ages. When he turned 33, we heard all kinds of references to Christ crucified, etc. An odd duck, all around.
Hardly. He’s completely against the family as an idea. He regards having children as the dumbest possible thing to do. The guy is a thoroughgoing nihilist.
Predictably, though, he’s got a lot of sex appeal to certain kinds of women. He can be quite charming. He simply has no investment whatsoever in humanity.
What is rather interesting is that he was a professor of literature and theory (until he retired recently). Reading his “Rate My Professor” comments is a wild experience. The spectacle of this character colliding with Millennials and Gen Z personalities is the psycho-social equivalent of a Monster Truck show.
At some point, the proper response is to laugh loudly and publicly at this idiocy. These people are the grown up version of some hyperprecocious second grader who scribbles their own crappy version of the Mona Lisa dressed as Darth Vader and everyone pats him on the head for being so creative instead of saying “grow up and stop wasting my time and yours.”
It's just the old "Épater les bourgeois"-- with bad art in bad taste ranging from the tacky to the disgusting. And long after les Bourgeois had lost its capacity for shock. For some artists its always 1899 and Victorian morality is always the foe to be dethroned. They're so far behind the times they make Donald Trump at his Luddite worst look innovative and progressive.
It’s astonishing that these people still imagine they’re “ cutting edge “. This stuff was old and worn out when Andres Serrano was doing it . It hasn’t attained a new freshness.
I recall, vaguely, a strongly-worded response by Khrushchev to Modern Art on a visit to an exhibition in Paris - too vulgar to repeat here even if I could recall it correctly - that might well be "recycled" for the current exhibition.
The thing is what Khrushchev saw was probably masterful compared to this, you know what. In another sense, coming from a tradition that sees art as agitprop, perhaps he would like this stuff because it does, in a sense, pitch for his side. And yes I’m kidding ,sort of. There is something akin to a human instinct that even a Khrushchev has ,that rebels against this. You have to be educated to worship garbage. Old time Communists actually tended to love kitsch but I think nihilist deathworks both puzzled and scared them. Too much faith in a glorious future, a shining path for that. We don’t want crucified frogs . We want muscular peasants.
What I recall he said was to this effect: "it looks like some bad boy sh*t and pi**ed on a canvas, and then spread it all round with his hands," adding, any Soviet lad could do it better but would never think of doing such a thing.
I remember attending a big atheist rally in DC where they paraded clownish figure of Jesus around before the laughing crowd. My first reaction was anger, but then I thought that Jesus was treated and humiliated like that from the beginning by unbelievers-- it's expected that they treat the cross like folly. Whether it's outlawed or not, that's unbelievers doing what unbelievers do.
I could have done without most of the images in this piece. The lede was disturbing enough and while I skimmed past the others I did not need to see it. Please link next time if the imagery is gross and give us the choice to burn our eyeballs.
I understand that, but, as much as I hate trigger warnings, it would have been nice to know that I was going to see some pretty disturbing stuff. You do often give NSFW warnings on things. The pic in the lede was bad enough. I probably would have given the post a miss all together, given what I know about myself and how much seeing that kind of stuff can disturb me spiritually and otherwise.
Every time we get angry (or don’t get angry) we broadcast what matters to us. This display of Christmas matters to Christians.
Is there a special fast to participate in with others to pray about this and protest this hateful display of Jesus, the Son of God’s birth. What would some Muslims do if Muhammad was displayed and disrespected such as this in Vienna? Let’s pray and perhaps fast.
We know what the Muslims would do, remember Charlie Hebdo? Although Muslims reacted negatively when the Last Temptation of Christ came out. To them, Jesus is a prophet and a proto Muslim which is absurd but they did protest against disrespecting Him.
Assuming, arguendo, that Mohammed was God's prophet, Jesus naturally is a respected and venerated predecessor. They view Jesus the way we view Micah and Isaiah.
That’s true but Jesus is bigger to them than the Old Testament prophets. They believe in His virgin Birth & that Allah will send Him to judge the world. Which makes the hostility of many Muslims to Christianity somewhat weird. Apparently the apparition of Mary in Egypt has drawn both Coptic Christians and Muslims despite Muslim discrimination against the Copts.
Mary and Fatima, daughter of Muhammad, are apparently the most honored women in the Quran. Venerable Fulton Sheen believed that the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima would be instrumental in the conversion of Muslims to Christianity. I certainly hope this is true. I pray for it daily.
“Which makes the hostility of many Muslims to Christianity somewhat weird.” Well as you probably know: in theory, and to varying degrees in historical practice, Christians are looked upon as a “people of the Book” and accorded more respect than, say, polytheistic pagans. But denying Islam’s view of Muhammad and the Quran, as well as insisting on Jesus’s divinity, are of course big no-nos.
In my experience, whenever an academic or artist uses the word "interrogate" you can be sure that you're reading a bunch of pretentious nonsense.
It would be beautifully ironic if Muslims attacked and destroyed this exhibit. Jesus and Mary are revered by them too. The cognitive dissonance of these degenerates would be seismic.
The bios of these artists are always interchangeable. They all interrogate authority, exist in the interstices, and disrupt discursive networks. Obnoxious enough?
Is it just me or does that last one look like Artemis of Ephesus?https://www.livius.org/pictures/libya/lepcis-magna/lepcis-magna-amphitheater/artemis-of-ephesus-1/
You will recall from the acts of the apostles that St Paul had a run in with their cult Acts 19:23-29
Totally does.
A Talmudic scholar, introduced to me via email by the son of a Pentecostal minister, told me that it is no coincidence the first Christian church devoted to veneration of the Virgin Mary was built in Ephesus.
I’m beginning to see that connection but it wasn’t mentioned when we went to see the Virgin Mary’s house in the hills outside Ephesus.
I'm sure they didn't. I am also intrigued by the fact that certain Old Testament references to the 'gods of other nations' that many Hebrews turned from their God to worship included "the Queen of Heaven." Of course that was a KJV translation. I don't go for a hard-line Calvinist or atheist interpretation that the RCC is worshiping idols. I grew up in a Catholic neighborhood, and I have a good friend from high school who is a Catholic priest. I find doctrine and dogma often get in the way, and produce factional disputes that are entirely avoidable if we remember that "Now we see through a glass darkly." There is a human need to have a feminine side to worship, and since we have only one God, it has to be found in other ways.
Excellent post.
Our Brooklyn neighborhood abounded in garden statues of the Virgin Mary. My father spent a good deal of time building a whole grotto for Mom’s statue that now resides with me after my sister sold her house and they moved into an apartment in Brooklyn.
The feminine principle in Catholicism (along with the cult of the saints) does in fact approach polytheism as my Protestant friends claim, but it does so asymptotically (veneration, not worship, a distinction worthy of debate but not to me) never actually reaching the tipping point, except in popular pieties that are not to be dismissed out of hand.
For years I was a grateful student of the Talmud, in a Talmud Study Group, invited by a close friend and political ally in Brooklyn who became ba'al teshuvah (a revert to his Jewish faith). He invited me because I had all sorts of Jewish texts from college theology classes that were helpful in his “journey home” (as the great Marcus Grodi calls it). It was among the greatest intellectual experiences of my life. Anyway, we touched briefly, on occasion, on topics related to the Kabbalah and it was interesting to see the feminine principle in Judaism.
As I remember it, the “Shekhinah” is the divine feminine aspect of God, representing God's nurturing qualities, immanence, and dwelling within the world.
Another thing I learned from the Talmudic scholar is that the woman (isha) was made by taking one SIDE of the Adam (the original human who was androgynous), and what was left became the man (isha). The man is not the same thing as Adam, and the woman is not the same thing as Eve. When an English translation says "son of man" (which occurs in the Old Testament as well as in the Gospels) the original reads ben-Adam. God is not, strictly speaking a male figure, male and female represent different aspects of the image of God, and marriage reunites the Adam. (Which is why in Orthodox Jewish teaching, same-sex attraction just isn't the same thing).
Yeah they love making up excuses for not practicing monotheism, just like their ancestors
I like the idea in orthodoxy of the saints replacing the fallen angels of nations and places although as an Anglican I don’t particularly venerate saints. I have started praying the Angelus a lot though. I can see that the mother of God replacing the temple of Artemis is something of that nature.
Blasphemy aside, we’ve had decades of this “but the REAL art is the audience’s reaction to it” b.s. We’re so over it, “artists”.
Hitler’s homeland, degenerate pukes. My prayer is that Austria becomes majority Muslim in my lifetime.
What a terrible thing to wish for.
Hopefully they will fight for Christ.
You might better pray that Saudi Arabia be converted to Orthodox Christianity. I expect the Orthodox church has a better chance of reaching a Muslim population than any other branch of Christian faith. After all, there are a lot of Orthodox in the middle east already, and Protestant theology (or liturgy) simply would not compute.
I’ve always thought that conservative Protestantism is closer to Islam than any orthodox Christianity, and indeed that the Reformers were substantially motivated by Muslim envy, the last time Islam was knocking on Vienna’s door. Eastern Orthodoxy is the most iconographic of all Christianities, for one thing.
I think the fact that these idiotic, bottom-feeding liberals keep thinking art in the vein of "Piss Christ" is compelling is, paradoxically, proof of how powerful Christianity remains in the Western psyche.
After all, if the cross had no power, why would these moral imbeciles need to rebel against it?
The mode of their rebellion is also informative. A true refutation of Christian symbolism would be to create symbolism (statues and art) that contradicts it, but is equally compelling and beautiful (or moreso). But that is not what we're seeing. These people reveal the limits of their vision and ability in the childish and predictable form their rebellion takes. "Piss Christ" is the ceiling for them.
I visited Andres Serrano’s apartment in Manhattan with some other art friends years ago. It’s full of reclaimed cathedral furniture, and the walls are all clad with stone from old churches.
The man himself was surprisingly generous, and I left feeling like his work was a warped longing for a transcendence he wanted so much to touch, but had somehow lost access to.
The trouble with so much contemporary art, for ages and ages now, is that it holds criticality as its core dogmatic position, and that at some point, that saw cuts off the branch on which the artist perches.
The trouble with Christian art is that it’s far too often either pedantic, hackneyed, or simply nonexistent.
There is some value in the complex abstract and symbolic languages uncovered in the 19th & 20th century, but that value must be reassessed and offered up in sacrifice to God to be fully realized.
If we don’t, it’s endless recursions of cheap blasphemy like the above.
Also, try pulling off any of this childish priggery with images of Mohammed.
Excellent set of observations here.
Thank you.
I think there do exist forms of media that wrestle with the enormous legacy of Christianity in a heteredox and modern way, while not being defamatory, embiterred or subtly demonic.
The example that pops into mind is Tom Holland's book Dominion and its cover, Salvador Dali's painting of Christ ("Christ of Saint John of the Cross"). I don't think the depiction of Dali is in any sense orthodox, but what I see there is a modern and secular mind trying to wrestle with Christianity.
What Dali "meant" with it can be debated, but what I see is a modern artist impressed and compelled by the crucifixion. However, he gets this vibe across using very modern visual language. The backdrop of Christ on that painting appears to be the void of space, the setup of the image is evocative of gravity. Whether it is respectful of Christianity or traditional forms can be debated, but I don't detect any malice or anti-Christian spite from that image.
Dali did eventually return to Christ after years of questing. And Dali was a prodigious talent and thinker too - even when he was an atheist he was never a total cynic.
Did you know he also penned a novel? He wrote it during WWII, and it is much like many earlier Russian and French grand novels, an story of many different interlocking lives spanning the pre-war years, through WWII, and into what he imagined post-war France would become. It's an odd book, but even that I would say is Christ-haunted. It was recently reprinted (I think for the first time since the late 70s?). It's called "Hidden Faces".
These are interesting bits of info, thanks! Surrealism itself was generally anti-iconic and anti-meaning, and very much opposed to traditional meaning, eg. Christianity. Nice to know that Christ reached even Dali in the end!
Dali did some great Catholic art (and some weird stuff). His most famous might be "Christ of Saint John of the Cross," which I really love--look for a good reproduction, the perspective is fantastic, and it's as if you're like a bullet shooting down from the Cross overlooking the world.
These idiot artists (sic) are nothing more than defeated chimps offering up their hindquarters to the dominant alpha culture. Submission, indeed.
Mapplethorpe springs to mind.
Jonathan Pageau covered a lot of this in his recent talk at the Touchstone Conference this year. If "criticality" or (more bluntly) Rebellion is at the core of what you allow to be "art" (not to mention artistic ego), then when you run out of things to tear down, you have nothing left but pure junk. You have nothing left to criticize and only a cynical rejection of any attempt to make or create anything.
Criticality is, in the end, nothing more than another form of parasitism.
Here is the talk. It's a good one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnMk_GFpVbw
I remember this talk, may rewatch. The only issue I often take with Pageau, and I may be oversimplifying his stance, is that he often seems to want to throw the whole enterprise of contemporary art under the bus.
I do think there are things that can be gleaned from some corners, particularly minimalism, light and space, and other movements that at least grasp (however weakly) at the numinous.
All true.
In a recent interview, Serrano said he was hurt by those who said he was anti-Christian: “I was brought up in Christianity, I am part of the church, and I feel connected to a long tradition of Christian artists working with the faith’s symbols.”
I've never liked "Piss Christ" but noticed over the years that Serrrano's defenders were much more vocal in their denunciation of Christianity than what would be expected from the artist. Serrano was always a bit more circumspect.
That tracks with my experience meeting him.
I actually do think the cross has little power today, with the caveat that I grew up in a secular family in an intensely secular part of the United States (the northeast), so it’s possible I’m simply being parochial.
That said, whether the cross is still a symbol worth attacking or not, I must agree whole heartedly that these artists are predictable, childish and uninspired.
Travel down the road a bit to central Pennsylvania, also a part of the Northeast. There you will find an ongoing and strong series of Christian communities, once you get outside of the Philadelphia suburbs.
The Penn family had seeded the belt of territory along the disputed border with Catholic Maryland with Presbyterians, Anabaptists, and so on as a kind of immunization policy. A lot of those people are still there.
The cross has power because it haunts secular people, because it's always there at the origin of social phenomena. So many secular trends and ideologies are either offshoots of Christianity, rebellions against it, or both. As just one example, consider how modern sexuality is best understood as a rebellion and reversal of traditional Christian sexuality.
Regular seculars don't understand this in the fully articulated and verbalized way of Tom Holland (of "Dominion") and Rod. Instead, it exists in their minds latently and subconsciously. It haunts them, sometimes drawing them towards the church (when standing in a cathedral) or repelling them away from it.
Some seculars, low on wisdom and high in self-admiration, grow agitated that they still exist in Christianity's shadow. These people normally base their identities on being brazenly "modern" and want to exorcise the shadow of the cross in an act of juvenile rebellion. "Piss Christ" is the embodiment of these efforts.
The reason the "Piss Christ" is pathetic is that it can never achieve its goal. Just like a teenager yelling at his parents doesn't undo his parents' defining influence in his life, a self-absorbed artist defaming his own cultural roots doesn't undo the fact that they are his roots.
A thought provoking and comprehensive reply. Thanks!
Yes, the cross does have power, as Jesus said, "When I am lifted up, I will draw all men unto Myself", and not always in a positive way.
I don't know what Serrano was trying to say with that work, but one message that comes across to me when I see it (I don't seek it out) is that most people - perhaps also some Christians (our history is very messy) - still revile Jesus and/or pay him no more mind than they pay their ejected bodily fluids. For some people, that may be intentional, even angry, rejection. For others, it may be something completely without thought or questioning introspection. For others, it may be taking Jesus for granted, however that is done. To me, it's a cautionary message: am I holding Jesus in contempt, in spite of what I say, through the way I live my life? Am I a "functional atheist"?
Dana
As noted in 1 Corinthians:”.. the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God"
Believe you me, the cross of Christ is power personified.
I was thinking of the piss Christ controversy (when Giuliani was mayor), Sarhaddon. There is an incredible essay written by David Bentley Hart (back in his First Things days) called “Christ and Nothing” that sums up how thoroughly Christianity is subsumed into our culture.
ABC = Anything But Christ
The man who did "Piss Christ" insisted that he was trying to make a statement about the commercialization of religion. He may have had a point. He didn't make it very well, if that was his point. The large point at the time was, do we really need to expend public funds to provide a grant that supports an artist for the rather limited effort of depositing a crucifix into a beaker of urine, and then take a picture of it? One expects rather more for one's money.
The problem with his explanation is that if he was trying to criticize commercialization of Christianity from a Christian vantage point, there would be many other ways to make that point.
I don't know too much about him, but this makes him seem like a twisted individual who lapsed in and out of loving and hating the church, coming up with excuses to cope with this dilemma.
Jesus Christ did not call His priests to be lukewarm. He said plainly:
“Because you are neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth” (Rev. 3:16).
When bishops praise what desecrates the Cross,
they do not show compassion — they show cowardice.
If the sacred is not worth defending,then what exactly is your vocation for?When priests cheer blasphemy,they do not reveal sophistication —
they reveal spiritual collapse.
Vienna once built cathedrals that lifted souls to Heaven.
Now clergy stand smiling as Christ is dragged into the gutter.
It is not the world’s mockery that wounds us most — it is the silence of those ordained to defend the holy.
A shepherd afraid to speak for Christ is not a shepherd.
Christ deserves defenders, not curators of blasphemy.
I hope someone writes the ultimate story on how the Jesuits could have drifted so far from the time St. Ignatius formed men who would rather die than allow Christ to be mocked.
St. Michael the Archangel — defend us in this battle.
Christ our King — reign in spite of Your enemies
I've spent some time in German-speaking countries, and my impression is that priests there - more than in the anglosphere - tend to regard themselves as part of the intellectual and cultural elite. Hence their simpering response to this kind of thing; it's terror of being thought unsophisticated and crude - "dumpf" as the Germans might say - by the people who matter.
And that is the most bourgeois thing ever—keeping up with the Joneses.
The German RCC is in open rebellion on the gay issue.
I was in Cologne earlier this year and the famous cathedral there had a mass for the local soccer team. Huh? Did the other team get one too?
One wonders how a German cleric would answer the question, "What must I do to be saved?"
Many priests, and certainly bishops, were from the ruling classes in times past, so they were always part of the elite, catering to the people who matter. Priests from peasant or craft families were climbing -- trying to get a foot on the ladder to become part of the ruling classes, even if they couldn't leave it to children they weren't supposed to have.
Very good. When I refer to the Catholic hierarchy I refer to them as “hirelings,” eagerly awaiting their next junket to wherever the USCCB meets.
Benedict knew this and his reference to a new, tiny Church did not necessarily mean that the ancient superstructures would disappear. They may continue, surviving as just another NGO, an ornament to the estanlishment, its leaders invited to all the right parties. A schism? No, more like an ember lying still beneath the ashes.
“We know now that the modern world is coming to an end . . . at the same time, the unbeliever will emerge from the fogs of secularism. He will cease to reap benefit from the values and forces developed by the very Revelation he denies . . . Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world, but the more precious will be that love which flows from one lonely person to another . . . the world to come will be filled with animosity and danger, but it will be a world open and clean.”
- Romano Guardini, ‘The End of the Modern World’
“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He who is a hireling and not a shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. He flees because he is a hireling and cares nothing for the sheep. I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me…”
John 10.11-14.
That interpretation of Benedict’s vision does seem to be the state of the Anglican Church. So far the Roman Catholic seems stronger. But we shall see.
You might try some Orthodox teaching/worship...Patristic Nectar is a good draught.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Well said! We must be Fierce Everyday Warriors for God’s truth. We cannot expect non-believers to follow God’s way, but surely we can expect bishops, etc. to uphold God’s truth and stand for what is good and pure and excellent and praise worthy.
My God. And most especially this: // From the exhibition website (notice the remarks by a bishop and by a Jesuit, who is the rector of Vienna’s Jesuit parish //
Rod, there is no good reason for hope, is there? Our cultural, political, money, and religious masters have all gone happily and smugly depraved.
How have the gates of hell not prevailed against the RCC branch of Christianity?
God has His elect in every season, and in every branch of the Church. The leadership may have fallen, but there are faithful Catholic believers in Vienna who are horrified by this crap, and devoted to seeking God.
The gates of hell had not prevailed when half of Europe peeled off into bloody schism. The German church is in big trouble but the Church is large and the pope has not taught heresy.
You can argue there is theological schism in the RCC, and that Francis did teach heresy. IMHO the biblical unity we are to strive for is in theological truth, not merely institutional unity.
It’s certainly possible to argue that but I sincerely don’t see how you can make the argument go through. Did he toy repeatedly with teaching heresies to which he was visibly personally tempted, in a scandalous way? Certainly. But it seems clear to me that even Francis knew what would happen if he tried to firmly lay down that, say, divorce and remarriage is sometimes fine now. (Well, the Orthodox aren’t in theological unity on that one anyway…so, say gay sex, then.)
A Google search will turn up a lot of serious heresy allegations about Francis, from Catholics. Saying 'who am I to judge' gays and appointing those squishy on the issue come to mind, the Borgia popes never tried to cast doubt on such a settled issue.
As I said, I hardly think a verbal comment in an interview which is very easy to square with the Catechism, as much as it caused understandable concern and was probably not well-chosen, can be seriously treated as the throne of Peter formally teaching heresy. Nobody thinks the Holy Spirit protects the Pope from all error or failure!
I'm not particularly religious, but it seems to me that a culture that would do this to the faith that served as the basis FOR the culture will ultimately get what it deserves. I don't know what type of world these artists think they are "building" - they build nothing at all, they only destroy.
The worst thing about it is that it is, and has been since Piss Christ, CHEAP. Nobody is going to suffer, well, not now, anyway, for this dime-store transgression. In fact, it's a plus. And Bishops say, have at it, boys. I wonder if Dr. Bob might have an opinion on +Glettler's promotion of this pile of shit. And yes we'll get it, hot and strong, any day now.
The $64K question is, Will any of it sell? Or will it molder away in some warehouse after a brief day in the sun? Years ago I went to art gallery opening because the place was owned by an acquaintance. The art displayed there was the stuff of drug trips and nightmares after too many chili dogs and onion rings. One piece features a tree that was turning into a nest of barbed wire against a gray-black sky. The artist saw me looking at it and asked me what I thought of it. I had to bite my tongue not to reply "Oh, that would look great in a torture chamber". That art gallery lasted six weeks and then closed.
I take your point, but it's subsidized by gallery owners, curators, and in addition these loathsome creatures flit from resident artist job to resident artist job to teaching positions. But it's not the point. To mess up the head of a child, to epater the bourgeois, to get the approval of their fellow freaks, that's reward enough.
See Rookmaker's book, "Modern Art and the Death of a Culture".
The there is the "art" some friends were sharing about on social media a year or two ago: a banana taped to a blank white wall with grey duct tape, being ooed and ahhed over by patrons of some gallery or museum.
And it sold for $6m!
There is a line in Mary Renault's. "The King Must Die" where Theseus writes to his father that the Cretans are ripe for conquest, they have become like children.
From the smell of some of it, a cold storage house would be more appropriate than a day in the sun. But to each his own..
It’s interesting that this stuff is seen as transgressive ( and since it’s pretty bad by any standard that is its purported value because it’s not about what it is but what it says) . Yet , there is no risk to it and what in our age is really transgressed.
You want some transgression for the new century? Faggot, dyke, towelhead. Try that out.
Depends on who’s saying it, Ted. Apparently there is a plethora of plays on Broadway right now with faggot in the title.
Ted I don’t think Pope Leo, I mean Dr Bob the meteorologist, would approve of this. He seems pious, and anyway, it’s not climate related.
So why doesn't he stop the cat in Innsbruck from promoting it? Why? TC is still in effect, and this guy can have a frog on a crucifix?
TC is still in effect, yes, but he gave permission for the Tridentine Mass to be said at St Peter’s within his first few months as Pope. By a Cardinal, Burke, who was in Francis’s crosshairs for years. I mean, I’m no Pope whisperer, but don’t you think that speaks volumes? Ted, I think you want a lot of “sit anathemas” and that’s not how it is going to play out.
Fair enough. Shut up about the weather, ok, Bob?
For what it’s worth, Ted, I did think Bob looked a little like Spock mind-melding the Horta when he was blessing the block of ice. “No kill I!”
The Pope doesn't have authority over a secular art gallery. He could ban showing this stuff in church facilities of course, and I can't see why he wouldn't. He could also excommunicate the artist, but I doubt the artist is communicant in the first place.
Well, Charlie, he has authority over the bishops who were promoting this. I think that’s what Ted was railing against.
True. I missed that bishops were actively promoting it. Although the First Amendment has no jurisdiction in Austria, as an American I note that one component of First Amendment jurisprudence is that if a dispute on matters of faith and doctrine enters a civil court case, courts are to accept the pronouncement of the highest judicatory body of any relevant church as the final word. Courts have no authority to question that, in matters internal to the church.
This art will shortly be forgotten, because it says nothing, does nothing and is worth nothing. It’s cheap mockery at best, and cringeworthy boorishness at worst.
I'm not even a Christian and I find this "art" grotesque. Just because one has an imagination, one does not have to put every aspect of this imagination to paint and canvas.It's a short step to paintings depicting cannibalism, rape, assorted forms of human degradation, etc.
That last part says it all.
I’ve got a buddy who thinks he’s an artist, but artfully denies it. He’s very much into the entire poststructuralist theoretical world. His latest idea is that the greatest work of art would be the extinction of the human species. I haven’t read through all his stuff recently, but I imagine it’s filled with sophisticated references to many and sundry well-known philosophical notions going all the way back. He’s not ignorant. But he is nihilistic. He turns 70 this year and has an odd penchant for marking off biblically important ages. When he turned 33, we heard all kinds of references to Christ crucified, etc. An odd duck, all around.
Does he have a wife and kids? If so, I don't envy them.
Hardly. He’s completely against the family as an idea. He regards having children as the dumbest possible thing to do. The guy is a thoroughgoing nihilist.
Predictably, though, he’s got a lot of sex appeal to certain kinds of women. He can be quite charming. He simply has no investment whatsoever in humanity.
Reminds one a bit of Henry Miller, maybe.
What is rather interesting is that he was a professor of literature and theory (until he retired recently). Reading his “Rate My Professor” comments is a wild experience. The spectacle of this character colliding with Millennials and Gen Z personalities is the psycho-social equivalent of a Monster Truck show.
At some point, the proper response is to laugh loudly and publicly at this idiocy. These people are the grown up version of some hyperprecocious second grader who scribbles their own crappy version of the Mona Lisa dressed as Darth Vader and everyone pats him on the head for being so creative instead of saying “grow up and stop wasting my time and yours.”
I was just thinking a similar thought. The sycophants gush that it’s “playful” but don’t realize they are intuiting the obvious: it’s childish.
It's just the old "Épater les bourgeois"-- with bad art in bad taste ranging from the tacky to the disgusting. And long after les Bourgeois had lost its capacity for shock. For some artists its always 1899 and Victorian morality is always the foe to be dethroned. They're so far behind the times they make Donald Trump at his Luddite worst look innovative and progressive.
It’s astonishing that these people still imagine they’re “ cutting edge “. This stuff was old and worn out when Andres Serrano was doing it . It hasn’t attained a new freshness.
Yes, this is what I would like to have said myself, but you put it much better than I could.
Exactly
Trump's opinion on this travesty would be right.
I recall, vaguely, a strongly-worded response by Khrushchev to Modern Art on a visit to an exhibition in Paris - too vulgar to repeat here even if I could recall it correctly - that might well be "recycled" for the current exhibition.
Something about the proper use of gold?
The thing is what Khrushchev saw was probably masterful compared to this, you know what. In another sense, coming from a tradition that sees art as agitprop, perhaps he would like this stuff because it does, in a sense, pitch for his side. And yes I’m kidding ,sort of. There is something akin to a human instinct that even a Khrushchev has ,that rebels against this. You have to be educated to worship garbage. Old time Communists actually tended to love kitsch but I think nihilist deathworks both puzzled and scared them. Too much faith in a glorious future, a shining path for that. We don’t want crucified frogs . We want muscular peasants.
Many of the comments made at the infamous 1961 Menage modern art exhibit in Moscow by Khrushchev were amusing, if crude.
At one point, potato face looked at some paintings, then at the artist, and asked, "Are you a faggot?"
What I recall he said was to this effect: "it looks like some bad boy sh*t and pi**ed on a canvas, and then spread it all round with his hands," adding, any Soviet lad could do it better but would never think of doing such a thing.
1961 sounds right.
I think they themselves avoided nihilist things, but were perfectly fine with the promotion of such in non-0communist countries.
Same comment as on other entry
————
There is a simple solution to the chaos if one wants to address it.
It is belief in the truth. Before one can fix the chaos, one has to understand the basic problem.
Truth -> religion -> culture -> politics -> events. If one focuses on events, one will never get at the real problem.
Also
Truth -> universe -> physical science-> technology We have got this version of truth mainly down. But not the rest.
Truth -> universe -> life -> mental activity -> natural law. We are far from understanding this so there is chaos here. Which is why
Truth -> universe -> life-> physical frailty -> medicine is screwed up in many areas.
Get back to understanding truth and the world will be a long way to fixing events.
The truth, universe, life, mental activity all interact.
Give Truth a Chance!
Do you know why Christianity is the true religion of the true Triune God?
Jesus told us they would mock us and they had mocked Him.
And that is only 1 reason.
The idea that Christianity has a deity with an earthly arrest record is compelling enough for me.
I remember attending a big atheist rally in DC where they paraded clownish figure of Jesus around before the laughing crowd. My first reaction was anger, but then I thought that Jesus was treated and humiliated like that from the beginning by unbelievers-- it's expected that they treat the cross like folly. Whether it's outlawed or not, that's unbelievers doing what unbelievers do.
Show The Way --David Wilcox
You say you see no hope
You say you see no reason we should dream
That the world would ever change
You say the love is foolish to believe
'Cause they'll always be some crazy
With an army full of liars
To wake you from your daydream
Put the fear back in your life
Look
If someone wrote a play
To just to glorify what's stronger than hate
Would they not arrange the stage
To look as if the hero came too late?
He's almost in defeat
It's looking like the evil side will when
So on the edge of every seat
From the moment that the whole thing begins
It is love who mixed the mortar
And it's love who stacked these stones
And it's love who made the stage here
Although it looks like we're alone
In this scene, set in shadows,
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us
But it's love that wrote the play
For in this darkness love can show the way
Now the stage is set
You can feel your own heart beating in your chest
This life's not over yet
So we get up on our feet and do our best
We play against the fear
We play against the reasons not to try
We're playing for the tears
Burning in the happy angel's eyes
For it's love who mixed the mortar
And it's love who stacked these stones
And it's love who made the stage here
Though it looks like we're alone
In this scene, set in shadows,
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us
But it's love that wrote the play
For in this darkness love will show the way
I could have done without most of the images in this piece. The lede was disturbing enough and while I skimmed past the others I did not need to see it. Please link next time if the imagery is gross and give us the choice to burn our eyeballs.
I had to show it so people could understand the horror that is being exhibited.
I understand that, but, as much as I hate trigger warnings, it would have been nice to know that I was going to see some pretty disturbing stuff. You do often give NSFW warnings on things. The pic in the lede was bad enough. I probably would have given the post a miss all together, given what I know about myself and how much seeing that kind of stuff can disturb me spiritually and otherwise.
Every time we get angry (or don’t get angry) we broadcast what matters to us. This display of Christmas matters to Christians.
Is there a special fast to participate in with others to pray about this and protest this hateful display of Jesus, the Son of God’s birth. What would some Muslims do if Muhammad was displayed and disrespected such as this in Vienna? Let’s pray and perhaps fast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nativity_Fast
We know what the Muslims would do, remember Charlie Hebdo? Although Muslims reacted negatively when the Last Temptation of Christ came out. To them, Jesus is a prophet and a proto Muslim which is absurd but they did protest against disrespecting Him.
Assuming, arguendo, that Mohammed was God's prophet, Jesus naturally is a respected and venerated predecessor. They view Jesus the way we view Micah and Isaiah.
That’s true but Jesus is bigger to them than the Old Testament prophets. They believe in His virgin Birth & that Allah will send Him to judge the world. Which makes the hostility of many Muslims to Christianity somewhat weird. Apparently the apparition of Mary in Egypt has drawn both Coptic Christians and Muslims despite Muslim discrimination against the Copts.
Mary and Fatima, daughter of Muhammad, are apparently the most honored women in the Quran. Venerable Fulton Sheen believed that the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima would be instrumental in the conversion of Muslims to Christianity. I certainly hope this is true. I pray for it daily.
“Which makes the hostility of many Muslims to Christianity somewhat weird.” Well as you probably know: in theory, and to varying degrees in historical practice, Christians are looked upon as a “people of the Book” and accorded more respect than, say, polytheistic pagans. But denying Islam’s view of Muhammad and the Quran, as well as insisting on Jesus’s divinity, are of course big no-nos.
In my experience, whenever an academic or artist uses the word "interrogate" you can be sure that you're reading a bunch of pretentious nonsense.
It would be beautifully ironic if Muslims attacked and destroyed this exhibit. Jesus and Mary are revered by them too. The cognitive dissonance of these degenerates would be seismic.
The bios of these artists are always interchangeable. They all interrogate authority, exist in the interstices, and disrupt discursive networks. Obnoxious enough?
You should write that up for MAD Magazine.
All the bios will soon be written by AI, if they aren’t already. Postmodern sentence generator would work, too.
Remember the young Austrian chap who threw the Pachamamas into the Tiber? Perhaps he could gather a few friends ...
Alexander Tschugguel
See my comment below.