We have just confirmed that BBC presenter William Crawley will be interviewing me at the next ikon gathering. William is a formidable interviewer who has talked with some of the worlds leading thinkers and social reformers (such as Peter Singer, Richard Dawkins, Melvyn Bragg and Gene Robinson). William hosts a weekly radio show called Sunday Sequence and has been known to tweet.
As some of you are aware I have been making arrangements for some time now to move over to the US. Well everything has now been finalised and I will be leaving Belfast in mid October. This move has been made possible through the generosity of some individuals who are supportive of my work and who are keen to see it impact a wider audience. This is an amazing opportunity and one that I am going to throw myself into without reserve. But, of course, there is some fear and trembling as I pack my belongings and prepare to relocate. It goes without saying that there are people who I will miss, some whom I will miss very deeply. But, in addition to that, I am also having to leave my spiritual home: ikon.
While I am planning to visit home regularly and continue to contribute to ikon’s ongoing development, the reality that I will not be part of the weekly planning meetings is a hard one. Over the years some of those meetings have been tough, at other times they have been a lot of fun, but mostly they have been inspirational. The people who have been part of those meetings over the years have been among the most creative and talented people I have known, so not being a part of the team for a while will be difficult. But, on the plus side, ikon could be in no better hands.
The last ikon gathering before I go will be taking place on the 4th October at 18:00 in the Black Box. It is going to be an ikon::speaks event, which gives me the opportunity share some thoughts before I leave. My desire is to use this as an opportunity to reflect upon one of core values that informs so much of ikon’s practice. If you are in Belfast at that time I would love you to come along and share this important evening with me.
I tried to post my response to Richard’s response on his website but it kept getting atomatically rejected (perhaps because of its size), so I am having to put it here. This will primarily be of interest to those who have already read what Richard had to say in response to my last post (which should be read before you read this)…
Thanks for responding Richard. I too see this as an academic dispute among friends and personally really like everyone involved. However I am wary of playing into that game too much. To talk about how we are all really friends and could sit and have a drink together is the common way that intellectuals view debate these days and part of the reason why fundamentalists reject it. I can see their point, to them the importance of the debate is placed in subservience to depoliticized friendships. It is as if the discussions do not really matter, only our current social interactions are important. To the militant however these philosophical/theological/political issues are more important than individual friendships (as I will mention below they rightly see a problem with the common liberal rendering of concrete and abstract). And we must remember how Jesus himself came with a sword!
These issues, as they infiltrate society, play out in real ways (either positive or negative) and are bigger than our like or dislike of each other. Of course I view what fundamentalists actually take to be important as totally ridiculous: the truth of their claim is to be found in its form, not its content. As I have argued elsewhere, their seeming potency is anything but.
In this way, contrary to what some have suggested (that we take ourselves and our views too seriously) I stand by the argument that if we do not care passionately, even obsessively, about this debate then we are not taking ourselves, or our views, seriously enough. Anyway, I will now run through your main points and respond,
—-
‘Setting oneself up as the prophetic/lone/contrary/heretical voice of hope is a dangerous thing to arrogate’
Hhhhmmmm, even if it were true that I have set myself up as some lone prophet this would be an ad hominem fallacy that does not deal with the substantive part of my argument.
‘”the Law itself is a transgression” – I recognise the “Hegelian move” but refuse it for philosophical and theological reasons…’
I have to see your philosophical and theological arguments in order to assess your claim… they would need to be good though!
‘I’d want to assert that seeing law (…..moral imperatives, social constraints, law of the land, international justice etc etc) is God-given and necessary and need not negate the structural critique of our complicity in sin that you outline’
It depends on whether by ‘necessary’ you mean that it is necessary to have some standards (laws) or whether you are saying that you can isolate which laws are necessary. I totally agree with the first and find the second philosophically/theologically problematic. I would need to unpack a little more about dialectics in order to show why. But the basic reason is that I cannot see how such metabeliefs can be grounded in Reason. They are properly dogmatic (in the sense that they need to be assumed and then employed in order to see how ‘useful’ they are). My point in outlining the Law – Crime – Law-is-crime dialectic is about showing how any given System is ideological in nature and ungrounded, but that this is generally concealed and needs to be revealed.
‘My point was to focus attention on the most vulnerable party to the scenario: “the widow and the orphan” in Somalia itself (and knowing folk working in Somalia I do understand that glamorising the Somali pirates and warlords is more than a tad offensive to those widows and orphans)…. The essence of my objection is a thoroughly political one: that when the grammar of the debate is framed around a dialectic with church, our language loses any coherent moral significance and becomes atomised and individualistic… The place with which you and Kester are asking these questions is not alongside the orphan and the widow… the poor and the marginalised are only co-opted as pawns to make a point about “our” marginalisation’
Here you seem to think that I equate the suffering of those in war torn parts of the world with Western Identity Politics. Even if I did (and I do not – I follow Badiou’s critique of identity politics and do not equate sexism in the workplace etc. to rape in a war zone) it is not connected to the core of the argument I made. Also I am not sure why I should be concerned that some of your friends would be offended by my claims (unless I am going to meet them at a party). Your friends sensibilities are not my concern. My point still stands until addressed – namely that your critique of Kester was depoliticised. Above you talk about ‘the widow and the orphan’ in humanitarian ways. The logic is something like this: ‘Real people are suffering, helping them is of prime importance, political questions are subservient’. Here you take a standard (non-Hegelian) reading of concrete and abstract (concrete being the suffering of real people, abstract being the opaque political background that they inhabit). I agree with Hegel that this understanding of concrete/abstract has got things the wrong way around (the concrete is really the opaque structural background that fuels the suffering, the abstract is the depoliticized concentration on people removed from political realities). I am a concrete thinker rather than an abstract one!
‘I can’t apologise for stating that i believe that “there is a coherent moral vision to be applied, inescapably, and we practice that moral vision in community and in our tradition’.
Don’t appologise for it… convince me! BTW I can agree with this statement if I change it slightly – ‘we must create a coherent moral vision to be applied, inescapably, and we practice that moral vision in community and in our tradition’
‘For so many academic liberal theologians as well as those in pastoral ministry, the “religionless Christianity” that was popularised in the 1960’s by John Robinson is just redundant, vacuous and didn’t work.’
I have seen this as well, but it frustrates me cause I generally don’t find reasons why. They just don’t seem to like it. Of course something is redundant in a certain way if everyone treats it that way, but as a philosopher I want to see reasons. Indeed perhaps the revitalised strength of Altizer that we are witnessing in some circles today is partly the result of an insufficiently strong critique by those who rejected him.
‘if my discourse cannot talk about good and evil, right and wrong, belief and unbelief… i will actually not be listened to and have (in their view) nothing to offer’
The issue is not about using these words but about working out what we mean by them. My point is that we must show how our beliefs about what these words mean are based upon metabeliefs that are problematic. The problem is both philosophical – these metabeliefs are taken as something that we can ground (making them inherently conservative) – and theological in the dogmatic sense – they don’t do enough to transform society in love. I am arguing that we need a teleological suspension of the Ethical in order to expose some of the problems with the way that our society is currently structured.
‘So, my persistent question remains, “where” is the unorthodox heretic/pirate located? It still seems to be located contra church’.
You obviously are not convinced by what I said concerning particularity within actuality. But you have not said why.
‘Many other people, and certainly the poor and the marginalised of this world, are looking for something rather more substantial from the church’
Again I refer to my comments on concrete and abstract. I am saying that your understanding of ‘substantive’ is ethereal. I am attacking the conservative, apolitical idea that says, ‘people are suffering, there is no time to sit around and do politics, we have to act now’. I am saying that this belies an inherent problem… if we do that we end up helping individuals but not changing structures – we change things in a way that ensures nothing really changes. Things are so bad we need to talk about real politics again. Politics with a capital ‘P’ rather than the managerial politics we see today in which ‘the end of history’ is assumed to have already taken place. Zizek makes a great point when he says that it while it is popular to ridicule Fukuyama in intellectual circles, we all seem to agree with him in practice.
At the moment the work of Kester Brewin, and myself, has been under a little criticism in the blog world. All sparked off by Richard Sudworth’s reflection entitled, ‘The Betrayal of Betrayal’.
I will get onto the meat of the criticism shortly, but for now I wish to mention how this article has brought out the feeling from some quarters that Kester and myself go ‘too far’ and that while we ‘need to be listened to’ we ‘push away from orthodoxy too much’ (and this from people who should be on-side!). It seems then that we are being relegated to that horrible place of domestication where people say, ‘lets listen to what they have to say, but turn them down a little’. How I wish we were actually being critiqued for not going far enough!
On top of this a recurrent theme is that our ideas, while well meaning, are ‘half baked’ and/or ‘only half the story’. All of these criticisms I will argue can be shown to be structurally problematic, once one understands the nature of the project that myself and Kester (if I understand him correctly) are propagating.
I want to argue that all of these criticisms fail to understand the properly dialectic nature of our work and thus miss the philosophical and theological import of it. Let us start to unpack this by taking the motif of ‘pirate’ that Kester employs. The point that our critics have failed to see is how Kester is employing the image of the ‘pirate’ precisely because pirates traditionally do not merely transgress the Law (i.e. are not merely criminals) but draw out how the Law itself is a transgression.
Take, for example, the chocolate bars we buy from local shops. Much of this chocolate is made up of coco beans imported from the Ivory Coast, where child slavery is widely used to harvest them. The chocolate that our children eat is thus the direct result of a slave trade employing children of a similar age being forced to work in horrendous circumstances (little pay, rape, beatings, murder etc.). Or take the majority of the clothing we buy, the cars we drive and the meat we consume. Each of these seemingly benign activities belies a dark and horrible reality (sweat shops, environmental destruction, extreme cruelty). The appearance of freedom, order and beauty that our Western ideological system emanates belies the reality of slavery, chaos and ugliness. The pirate is not to be misunderstood as a simple criminal (one who affirms the order they transgress – wanting merely to reconfigure that order so that they have more within it). The pirate, at his or her best, is much more than that – their activity exposes how the Legal System that they transgress is itself a transgression (see Hakim Bay or Zizek for more on these issues).
This leads us to the fundamental problem with Sudworth’s apolitical and insufficient understanding of the situation in Somalia. For instance, he questions Kester’s suggestion that the pirate’s activities may help us to rethink global geopolitics and articulate an alternative vision of where the real problems lie, by using the old reactionary logic of saying,
‘Well, if you ask a poor Somali woman whose children have been killed by the Somali warlords growing rich on the piracy (for that is yet another side of the story), the answer would be a no-brainer. The point is that there is a coherent moral vision to be applied, inescapably, and we practice that moral vision in community and in our tradition’.
There are numerous problems with this response. But the main one is that we witness here the old ideological defense of Western Global Capitalism in which there is an ‘apolitical’ (conservative politics hidden as such) concentration on subjective violence (the violence done directly by the pirates – kidnapping, beatings, killings etc.). While awful in and of itself, this strategy masks the political question that these Somali Pirates force us to ask. Yes they are often brutal and violent, but by stealing ships full of Tanks (bound for Kenya) and luxury goods (made often under horrific conditions) we need to go further and make the (non-symmetrical) connection between the subjective violence of the pirates (which should be condemned) and the objective violence of the system that they are directly attacking.
It’s easy to condemn subjective violence because there is someone we can point to, but when attempting to attack the objective violence of the System itself things get difficult because there is no one person or group of people we can blame (who is number one? We are). The problem here is that the Hegelian move has not been made (in which one shifts perspective from seeing a mere crime against the law to perceiving law itself as criminal). Again, when Kester mentions the shift from ‘pirate radio to BBC’ and ‘Napster to Spotify’, this is not a mere individual ‘romance of the new’ as Sudworth claims, but a properly philosophical insight that pirate radio and Napster, in different ways, did not merely transgress the law but showed how the legal system itself was exploitive. As such they opened up the way for new configurations. For example, the free access to music, while condemned as theft by the music industry, helped to expose the exploitation within that industry and short-circuit the unhealthy control they possessed. It was indeed a form of theft, but a form of theft that exposed the theft of the system itself.
I myself have opted for a different motif in order to draw out the radical, dialectical nature of theology. Namely, the phrase ‘Orthodox Heretic’ (a phrase that, as yet, is not widely used). I have chosen this term carefully for numerous reasons that would take too long to explain here. However I will mention one that is pertinent in this discussion.
Theologically speaking I am making the same structural move as that mentioned above concerning the political dimension. Namely that we must move from the idea that there is an Orthodox Christian stance and a heretical positioning that transgresses it, to the point in which we see Orthodoxy itself as heretical. This is the first of two basic moves. This first move exposes how there is no absolute foundation to orthodoxy, that it was formed contingently over time through debate, discussion and argument and that its necessity was then retroactively constructed and maintained by the victor. A point that almost any non-partisan historian of religion will attest to. The second basic move of Orthodox Heresy is to then show that new theological configurations are possible, that new constructs and institutional practices can be imagined. In short, that we are free to mould and remould the church in different and imaginative ways (as has been the case throughout history).
I will need to now try to short-circuit the non-dialectic response that this post might generate in our critics, namely that this sounds like I am throwing out the old in some ’romance of the new’. By no means! Again this rests on a problematic philosophical ground that sees actuality and potentiality as distinct spheres (al la a certain reading of Aristotle). The potential always being that which is not yet, and the actual being nothing other than potentiality realized. On this thinking myself and Kester are presupposed to be prophets of the potential against actuality. But this is a mistaken understanding. We are instead calling for the potentially that exists within actuality. This is the Pauline position (Christ has come, the event has taken place).
The actually existing church is full of potentiality, the event is housed within it, and the role of the outsider theologian (the orthodox heretic, the theological pirate) is to uncover that potentiality. Returning not to some idealized, ossified reflection of church practice, but rather to the event which gave birth to existing church practice, thus opening up new imaginative spaces. Here the new is extremely old, the contemporary is ancient.
So to ‘betray our betrayal’ is to misunderstand our negation of negation (fidelity is betrayal, orthodoxy is heretical, God is the ultimate rebel, Christianity is anti-Christian) as a mere negation (betrayal, heresy, rebellion, anti-Christian) and then move back to a previous affirmation (fidelity, orthodoxy etc.).
To attempt to rein us in and pull us back is then to fundamentally miss the nature of our project. Sudworth is right to dismiss those who would not take us seriously, but he is dead wrong in thinking that we do not have a project and deeply mistaken that we, ‘magpie-like’ play with ‘sociology, philosophy, contemporary culture, with the occasional leitmotif of scripture’. On a personal note I am only beginning my writing career and have not yet a large body of writing behind me, but I hope to show in the next twenty or thirty years that the ideas I have outlined above have significant theological, indeed Christological, import.
I have just returned from the Matter 09 conference in Austin, Texas. It was a fantastic few days that blended theology, philosophy, art, theater and music in an endeavor to explore how the Christian faith is infused with creativity. There were so many things that took place over the weekend which I could comment on. However, for now, I thought I would write about the group who brought the conference to a close. They are from Waco, are called ‘VOID‘, and offered a gathering entitled ‘GODISNOWHERE‘.
VOID are a creative powerhouse who describe themselves as ‘an experimental faith collective’ who employ ‘a live mix of music, art, spoken word, personal reflections, and ritual to creatively engage questions of faith and doubt’. On their site they go on to say that they provide ‘provocative and experiential’ events that are ‘marked by the religious question… radically open and non-confessional’.
GODISNOWHERE offered an exquisite theo-poetic exploration of the intimate relationship/antagonism between those (parts of us) that believe in God’s presence and those (parts of us) that find such belief problematic. In a gesture reminiscent of Christ on the cross (where the experience of God’s absence is etched into the very experience of God), VOID drew us, for a brief moment, into a fragile, sacred space in which these seemingly opposed positions wed.
VOID is a formidable group that deserves to be taken seriously as a collective on the edge of religious life who are prophetically exploring an alternative way to inhabit faith. In the current discussion concerning what faith practice will look like in the coming epoch VOID have something to say.
Below are some pictures from GODISNOWHERE and two video’s they created for the event,
——
- Photos taken by Jackson Griggs
- Videos filmed by Kasia Plazinska, edited by Chris Burch, and starting Aaron Ellis (who just looks so cool)
Ben Jones from ikon was able to capture some clips from our Greenbelt Gathering. There is rumor of a longer video in existence, but until we track it down this will give you a tiny taste of how the evening looked and felt.
While I was only a star in the sky when The Prisoner was first shown it still stands out to me as one of the most interesting and thoughtful shows ever produced. It appears that a remake will be shown in November, although I confess to being skeptical that the creators can remain true to the depth of vision we find in Patrick McGoohan’s masterpiece (McGoohan being the man who conceived of the idea, wrote many of the episodes and starred in it).
The original series remains as a singularly powerful exploration of self-alienation in the contemporary world and the attempt to unplug from it. Something I have commented on earlier in my blog.
It is not insignificant that McGoohan, who had a deep Christian faith, conceived of The Prisoner. This is a series that makes a deeply theological point similar to what we find in Slavjo Žižek’s work. In The Monstrosity of Christ Žižek argues that Christianity is the revealed religion par excellence as it reveals that there is no founding order behind our lived experience. Christianity, is the religion that destroys religion (that which posits a natural order/balance). It exposes the contingent nature of all given orders and challenges us to unplug from the given matrix of meaning so that we can fight for real change through love.
The Village in The Prisoner is a place of balance and order, a place that provides all meaning to those inside and regulates their position in the society. Number 6 is thrown into this world as a disruption, as one who questions its legitimacy, and threatens its equilibrium (Number Six thus inhabits the position of the hysteric). However, unlike George Lukas’ pagan universe, where Darth Vader (the one who brings imbalance), is a force for evil. McGoohan understands that the one who brings a sword into the world of ‘natural’ order is a force for real transformation (Number Six). Paganism and Gnosticism (which Žižek insightfully defines as the reinscription of Judeo-Christian thought back into the Pagan universe) are critiqued in The Prisoner as the site of oppression and death.
In Star Wars the Christ figure (Darth Vader) is a force for evil (as he must be in a pagan universe) while the Christ figure in The Prisoner is the ultimate force for genuine transformation. A defense of this requires a more in-depth analysis than we can afford to do here, but it is something that I hope to write about in the future.
In the mean time I recently found this fascinating interview with Patrick McGoohan discussing the series in a darkly lit, smoke filled studio,
So it is time to unveil the winning parable. It was difficult choosing 2nd and 3rd place as there where around half a dozen others that particularly stuck out to me as possible candidates. However, when I received this parable I knew straight away I had the winner in my hands.
This parable is not only beautifully crafted, but has a narrative that really made me stop in my tracks and think. This is a piece of writing I have returned to many times since I received it a few weeks ago. It is engaging, disturbing, thoughtful and rich enough to inspire interesting and conflictual commentaries. The parable was written by Kester Brewin and is entitled Footprints…
There was once a man who had lived a long and difficult life. When he finally lay down, a faint smile bent the lines in his face as his eyes were shut. He had run the race; now he could rest. The curtain was pulled back, and he stumbled through the light to meet God.
‘My Master and my Friend,’ the old man hailed God as he prostrated himself before God’s feet. Hearing no reply, the man looked up and saw God shuffling awkwardly in his chair, not quite managing to fight back a blush across his cheeks.
Not wanting his moment of judgement and welcome to be spoiled, the old man gathered his courage and spoke up. ‘My Lord and my God,’ he began, nervously. ‘Is this not the time when my life and works shall be weighed in your scales and my named checked against those who have made it into the Book of Life?’ After such a tiring day it was difficult for him to remember the exact details of what was meant to be happening, but he felt certain that it should be God who should be taking the lead.
‘My child,’ said God sadly, before petering out and looking around for some way out.
Following God’s gaze, the old man took in a crumpled photo, pinned to a crowded notice board hung askew in a dark corner. His heart leapt. ‘Father,’ he said, getting up carefully like a servant in Medieval court, ‘here is a photo of footprints on a beach…’
God took it and stared at it for a while and as the man perceived his eyes glistening, his own tears came, for he knew the photo, and knew the words of comfort that came with it. ‘Tell me, Lord,’ he said, knowing already the lines that would come, ‘tell me what the footprints mean.’
And so God began.
‘Your life has been like a walk along the beach with me, many scenes from your life flashing across the sky. In each scene there are footprints in the sand, sometimes two sets, at other times only one.’
At this point God paused, and looked down, and so the old man seized the initiative, and played too his part.
‘Lord, this bothers me because I notice that during the low periods of my life, when I was suffering from anguish, sorrow or defeat, I can see only one set of footprints.’
He looked up, but saw God unmoved, so continued. ‘You promised me Lord, that if I followed you, you would walk with me always. But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life there has only been one set of footprints in the sand.
Why, when I needed you most, have you not been there for me?’
He bowed his head, holding back the tears, ready for the words of succour that he knew must come.
And slowly God replied, his voice shaking with emotion. ‘The years when you have seen only one set of footprints, my child, is when you carried me.’
The man frowned for a moment, paused, and then looked up. ‘Surely Lord,’ he began rather embarrassed to be correcting the Almighty, ‘you mean when you carried me.’
‘My dear child,’ God said, twisting a loose thread of cloth from his flowing robes, his face suddenly a mirror in which the old man saw the battles he had fought and the doubts he had put asunder, ‘this was the measure of your faith: when difficulties came, you gathered up this tired and arthritic God, and carried your beliefs to safety.’
A small wind blew through the old photographs and worn papers, and the two men sat in silence for a moment.
‘I have prepared a room for you,’ God said after a while, ‘though I quite understand if you don’t want me to stay.’
I don’t want to say too much about this parable, except that it reminded me of Etty Hillesum’s diaries. Hillesum’s work was born out of the horrors of Nazi occupied Amsterdam (she was eventually murdered at Auschwitz on 30th November 1943). In one of her diaries she wrote to God saying, ‘Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold you responsible. You cannot help us but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last’.
Thank you Kester for such a rich, difficult and rewarding parable.
Second prize in the parable competition is being awarded to John Janzen for a short entry entitled Constantine’s Conversion -
The Emperor Constantine, facing the biggest battle of his reign, looked into the setting sun at the Lilvian Bridge and saw a vision of the Cross of Christ. As he gazed at the cross he heard a voice say “By this sign, conquer”.
The next day he gave up his reign as Emperor, surrendered all his many possessions, and went to live and work among the poor. And forever after he was known as one of the greatest heroes of the faith for his obedience to the voice of God.
I chose this short parable for second place as I liked how it took a central moment in the development of Christianity and employed it to explore the importance of interpretation. The apocryphal story from which this parable draws its power concerns an event that took place before the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312. It is said that Constantine witnessed a huge cross in the sky with the words ‘By this sign, conquer’. Constantine took heed and commanded his troops to adorn their shields with a sign of the cross. They won this important battle and, as such, Constantine converted to Christianity.
In this parable we are asked to reflect upon whether Constantine really understood what it meant to conquer by way of the cross, or whether his military might and earthly power caused him to misunderstand what it really means to conquer by way of the cross.
I am running a couple of days late with the parable competition winners. Sorry about that. It is a mix of disorganization on my part and genuine difficulty in deciding who to award prizes to. I initially isolated nine entries that particularly stood out to me and have finally made my decision.
This morning I will announce third place. This afternoon I shall announce second place, and tomorrow I will announce first place.
Before doing that however I should briefly mention how I made my final selection. I intitially sifted through the entries to find parables that challenged me, puzzled me and that stayed with me after the others had retreated into the background of my mind. Stories that made the usual unusual again (helping me take note once more of insights I take for granted), overturned problematic common sense ideas or inspired me. As such it was a largely subjective project insomuch as I was looking for parables that spoke directly to me as a subject.
So, third place is being awarded to Jake Myers for his parable entitled Jacob the Alchemist -
There once lived a wizened and withered alchemist named Jacob. He lived in a shack high in the Bavarian mountains and he so devoted himself to his labors, that he had contact with neither man nor woman from the time he began his work until the day he died.
Jacob had a book on alchemy that had become both his scientific guidebook and source for inspiration and enlightenment. Daily he would carefully add ingredients to his smelting pot in the hopes of one day producing gold. The book was precise as to the consistency and makeup of the precious metal, with detailed descriptions and even sketches of gold’s appearance when properly made.
To his dismay, Jacob never managed to produce gold from non-precious metals. Every time he thought he had done it, that surely this time he had succeeded, his comparison to his book showed that he had failed.
Eventually, the old man died and a letter was sent to Jacob’s only living relative, a cousin who lived in a small village. Upon hearing of his cousin’s passing, the man journeyed high into the mountains to arrange the funeral.
When Jacob’s cousin entered the house, he was dumbfounded. Scattered carelessly around Jacob’s workshop were huge piles of gold. As heir to Jacob’s fortune, his cousin rejoiced at the alchemist’s success. He loaded down his mule with gold and filled his pack; he even buried a wagon-full in the hard ground to retrieve at a later time. As he worked, excitedly collecting his new fortune, Jacob’s cousin wondered why the old man had never made use of his discovery.
As he prepared Jacob’s body for burial, he found a worn, leather-bound alchemy book in his cousin’s breast pocket. As he flipped through the pages, something caught his eye that he could not believe. Though the ingredients for making gold from base metals were clear in every detail, the description of the final product was incorrect. The book described gold as brownish in color with red striations running throughout. Even the accompanying sketch of a gold brick was so far afield that Jacob’s cousin laughed to himself. ‘How could one so bright as to produce gold not recognize the genuine product when he saw it?’
I enjoyed this parable as it caused me to reflect upon how the actions we perceive to be useless may actually be of great value to others after we have gone. I wonder whether the parable could be even more interesting if it was written in a slightly different way. If, for instance, it was everyone in the neighboring village who did not know that what he was creating was in fact gold. Living in the midst of such great wealth and yet never perceiving it.
We had such a great time offering pyro-theology at Greenbelt (though we gave the health and safety huge headaches). I will compile the spoken word parts soon to give you a feel for what we did. For now I thought I would offer you a few photo’s of the evening (sadly I don’t have any photo’s of the fires on the floor of the auditorium or the antics that took place outside as people waited to get in).
With Greenbelt over for another year I am now turning my attention to the upcoming Matter Conference. I will be offering four keynote seminars. These are,
——
From theo-logos to theo-poetics: Re-imagining the language of faith
Performative dis-courses: Revelation and the lost art of disruption
Being in the World but not of it: Transformance art and the act of unplugging
Lessons in the art of Evandalism: Bringing it back home
——
Also joining me for the conference are,
Bill Mallonee (The Vigilantes of Love)
Joseph Frost (Playwright and Actor)
Dr. Cassandra Falke (Assistant Professor of English at East Texas Baptist University)
Dr. Warren Langford (Minister of youth at First United Methodist Church)
Graeme Lowry (Filmmaker and Storyteller)
Dr. Justin McBrayer (Philosopher at Fort Lewis College)
Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton (Photographer and Teacher at Pagosa Springs High School)
Trey Allen (Director of Spiritual Formation at Sugar Land First United Methodist Church)
Julie Clawson (Writer and Former Church Planting Pastor)
Dr. Jeff Dueck (Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Mount Ida College)
Andrea Janelle Dickens (Poet and Assistant Professor of Medieval History at United Theological Seminary)
Dr. Dena Davis Freed (Theatre Scholar, Artist, and Educator)
Kevin Meaux (teacher at Lamar University)
Joshua Meier(multi-disciplinary artist)
Matt Recla(PhD student in Religious Studies at the University of California)
Dr Mark Tazelaar(Professor of Philosophy at Dordt College)
Thomas Turner (Editor, Literary Arts of GENERATE Magazine)
Peter is the founder and co-ordinator of Ikon (a community which describes itself as iconic, apocalyptic, heretical, emerging and failing) as well as being a writer and freelance lecturer in Philosophy
