Friends,
So, I am in the middle of exams and cannot really write this blog as I would, but I thought I should say that I have found a place to begin a series of blogs that have been brewing in me. As some of you know, I am a Christian again after a long and mostly Atheistic hiatus, and have returned with no small amount of anger at both Christianity as I tend to find it, and at the options into which I had drifted.
The symbolic universe of Christianity offers endless possibility for relevant interpretation. The death of Christ was not only an explosion of redemptive blood. It is a fruitful analogy for the relationship of a symbolically rich human to their body, a foundation for radical politics, a poetic trope of incredible power, an image of war against God, an act of magic, and most probably a historical non-occurance. An incredible lie, a saving lie. Not to rant, but those are the first that come to mind.
To come back to Christianity convinced of the fantatic potential of its stories has been a disappointment, to say the least. Christian rock music, for instance, ruins my day. With its cloying obsession with salvation, its absolute illiteracy and its shared organs with American Republicanism, one need not say that their theology is wrong (and I am not really convinced that it is) to say that it is selling Christ short. There may be more, but for now Sufjan Stevens' album "Seven Swans," and maybe Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" are the only decent works of Christian rock I know of.
For the record, I locate myself as a soon-to-be member of the UCC's and part of the Emerging Church movement, for which one need not submit an application. In my spare time (when I find it), I want to begin thinking about popular culture and theology, and maybe sharing it here where you may or may not read it as you like. Time needs to be spent thinking about whether the symbolic traditions of Christianity can be rescued from their present tarnish. (Yes, Jesus saves, fine. But who will save Jesus?) What the emergence of an inspired video-translation of the Bible will be, and how we will deal with it, because the frequent public reception of The Passion of the Christ as "true" shows that it is coming.
What follows does not draw heavily on Christian symbols, but it hit me as a pleasant way to begin thinking about things, and it falls heavily across the Pythagorean traditions that have motivated some generations of progressive and daring interpreters of Christianity. For the most part, though, I just liked it. And it seemed like something to place at the end of the above babble, none of which I would have written had I not been so exhausted that I could not write more.
Cheers and sorry for the pretention,
PS. I appologize for the sexist middle part of the song. It is ugly and vacant, but I am not able to remove it. I struggle to imagine for whom this video was made. Hipster ironists? I do not have time to talk about it, but I thought the total package, including the ugliness, was good to think.
Vince(nt)
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