Simply... sacred.

I just stumbled upon a blog with an entry that read the following:

"Within the emerging church over the past decade there has been a return to the use of icons, images, and rituals to help point people to God... Could it be, we actually worship the creator of heaven and earth who is already all-present, if we would only stop to notice?


Maybe the only difference between the sacred and the secular is that the secular doesn’t know it’s sacred yet."


While this doesn't bring anything new to the table, it just reminded me of what we talked about in class-- our generation's general inability to STOP and perceive. Employing simplicity really is our best bet here. Not only would it be financially wiser, but it would convey the message that sacred does not necessarily imply complexity, or some radical otherness; it might be something ordinary that we have simply never noticed before.

--Emily :)

frozen grand central

for those of you who are interested here is the link for the youtube video...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=jwMj3PJDxuo

enjoy.
tatiana.

Aw or awful?

I agree with Mike’s comments about the ‘Controversial Art?’. While it would be interesting to figure out a way to juxtapose both religion and science, it may cause an somewhat awkward subliminal message. That said, I thought of something during our last class that does combine the two in a way that may elude such a strain. If we did an art sequence, presumably paintings/drawings, that showed the full growth cycle of a plant that has yielded medical miracles (such as a willow, from which aspirin’s beneficial component was gleaned) and then at the end had a scientist holding aspirin or a clear representative of it, we could have one Jesus’ miracles next the scientist or if possible across, generating a sort of mirror image for religion and science. This would work well going up a staircase or down a hall.

I realize that the idea is in a rather crude form, so I would welcome comments and suggestions.

Controversial Art?

 I was thinking about what we were talking about last week when we were thinking about finding a way to juxtapose the miracles of Jesus and the miracles of modern science, and also about the idea that the cross is so familiar to us that no one thinks about it anymore. It crossed my mind that we could combine the two concepts, and represent well-known biblical stories with modern people substituted for the biblical characters. We could show a doctor raising Lazarus, a chemist changing water to wine, or MLK jr. being crucified. Of course,I realize that all that might be too far of a stretch. Conversely, we could have an image of a doctor and patient overlayed with biblical text about Jesus healing, or have an image of civil rights peace protesters with the "turn the other cheek" message on top (or maybe the part from the beatitudes where Jesus says "blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake" (Matthew 5:10) or something like that). I know we said we probably want to do something more spiritual than religious, but I figured I'd throw it out there as an idea anyway.

Water

For some reason, when thinking about this project, I keep thinking about water. Beal talked a little bit about the connection between water and the divine at a fountain at the Precious Moments exhibit, but another interesting thing stood out to me when reading this book (and others)—the use of water imagery in language as well. Standing in the middle of Cross Garden, Beal says, “A religious stream of consciousness seems to be running through this garden, welling up from some undetermined, unconscious source of creativity” (121).
Image and Spirit got me thinking about water, too. One part that seemed especially relevant to our project was Paul Tillich’s ideas about depth—that “depth as a metaphor for the spiritual dimensions of life have continuing usefulness in our search for a definition of the spiritual in art that is limited enough still to define, yet open enough to allow as many people as possible to enter into the discussion” (11). Although not entirely in the way Tillich means, depth, again, reminds me of water, and this passage reminds me of the way we ended our class last week talking about how we wanted to make sure that whatever art we decided to contribute to the building was spiritual and not necessarily religion-specific.
Water is interesting to me because it seems to be a solid connection between science and religion. Water is a fundamental part of nature, creation, and the human body. It is also fundamental to the study and understanding of science (scientists can break it down into hydrogen and oxygen, etc), as well as the rituals and practices associated with religion, mysticism, and spirituality. In a religious as well as natural sense, water creates, sustains, and perpetuates life—much like various deities do and have done in several religious traditions. Water is also extraordinarily powerful—while it can create, it can also destroy, as we have seen in the Bible (Noah, Red Sea, etc), other ancient traditions, and even currently with storms such as hurricanes and tsunamis. It comes as no surprise, then, that a prime characteristic of many of the ancient storm gods and powerful deities is the ability to control and manipulate water (think of Jesus walking on water—in Japanese creation stories, too, a formless material is sculpted by the gods into what we now know as earth). Everyone knows what “Holy Water” is. The vision of Paradise in Islam involves flowing water and flowering, green earth. Think of the scientific “creation story,” too, about evolution and organisms forming and evolving—water was a necessary and essential player in that one, too.
Needless to say, water is everywhere in a discussion of religion—not only is it a powerful symbol, but it purifies and cleanses in both a scientific and a spiritual sense. It appeals to all of the senses, something that I think is important when trying to capture the feeling or the essence of the transcendent. Water has the ability to elicit a “sense of awe” as well as facilitate meditation. I’m not saying that our art has to actually involve water, although that would be cool—but I think that some representation of water would be both meaningful and beautiful. Just a thought…see you guys on Wednesday :)

The Egg

An excerpt from The Golden Egg:

Eggs immediately began to crop up everywhere: in Russian fairy tales, Vedic scriptures, English nursery rhymes, in German Romanticism or in Victorian fantasy, in Clemes Brentano’s “Gockel, Hinkel and Gackeleia,” J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit or in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. They even showed up in astronomy when Johannes Kepler, intent on discovering perfect circles in the planetary orbits, was disappointed when he encountered ellipses and had to accept the awful truth that even the solar system seems to prefer eggs. A cosmic egg is central in Hindu mythology, in which it is called Hiranyagarbha, the egg containing the creation, the subtle germ of the material world. It is reflected by the solar plexus and the crystal egg inside the Athanor, the alchemical oven.

Egg shapes can thus be found on many levels of our existence, in the kitchen and in the stars, in design and metaphysics, from birth to death. In this sense, the egg expresses a fundamental truth of alchemy as found in the Tabula Smaragdina: ‘As above, so below.’ In hindsight then, this symbol seemed to us to possess sufficient fertility to engage researchers in many fields and from different disciplines. The very nature of alchemy as an art that is both subjective and objective, material and spiritual calls for an interdisciplinary approach.

The egg is a popular symbol for creation and clearly it comes up in science all the time (astronomy, alchemy, biology). Here are some websites that talk about the role of the egg in culture:


The Dogon tribe in Africa - the first site talks about the mythology of the egg creation and the second shows a picture.
1. http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/mythology/118502
2. http://kachina2012.wordpress.com/category/dogon-cosmic-egg/


Some creation stories - India, China, and Japan deal with the egg
1. http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ab83


This book, Symbols of Sacred Science, might be a really good one to try to get a hold of. Click "more" under the Contents and there are two sections that deal with the egg: "The Heart and the World Egg" and "The Cave and the World Egg."
1. http://books.google.com/books?id=qEQQht2Y2CQC

The Heart and the World Egg excerpt: "The biblical figure of the Terrestrial Paradise, which is also the 'Center of the World,' is that of a circular precinct which may be considered as the horizontal section of an ovoid or a spherical form..."

The Cave and the World Egg excerpt: "The two halves into which the 'World Egg' is divided according to one of the most common aspects of its symbolism, become respectively heaven and earth..."


This site deals with different meanings/interpretations/definitions of the egg.
1. http://www.experiencefestival.com/egg


And, finally, my last site. It's an article about the symbolism of the egg, and specifically ostrich eggs, which are often displayed in churches.
1. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7086/full/440872a.html


Maybe we could have an egg theme! Haha, just a thought...

-Aubrey :)

Chet Raymo on Science Musings

Hi, everyone. I wonder if you know the site that Chet Raymo, Stonehill professor emeritus and former columnist for the Boston Globe, runs. You might want to take a look. It is found at:

www.sciencemusings.com

Not everyone has signed onto the blog site yet. If you know of anyone lagging behind, do bug, cajole or force them to do it.

JL