Category: Church
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You Shall Know the Truth… And the Truth Shall Keep You Bound
Been quiet here with end of term busyness and stuff, but as we come to the first Sunday in… well, around 150 years, where there’s not been a News of the World to buy, I wanted to offer some reflections on the phone-hacking scandal. It’s pretty much dominated the UK news for weeks now, and…
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Le Quattro Volte | Putting Humanity’s Role into Perspective
I went to see Michelangelo Frammartino’s new film last night, Le Quattro Volte. This is a very difficult film to do justice to on the page, but I will simply say: try to go and see it. Do all you can to get to see it at the cinema. This is cinema. Not plasma TV…
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Tombs for Gods Who Once Spoke
Tombs For Gods Who Once Spoke Temples, churches, mosques, you great piles of stones gathered against entropy, the fruits of hard labour, gathering moss in the rain and reaching, always reaching high to poke the underbelly of heaven. In all my travels, in all the steps I’ve climbed and candle-lit interiors, heavy with incense and…
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‘The Referee’s a W*nker!’ | Sport and Divine Violence
April is the cruelest month… Easter always coincides with the culmination of the football season in Europe, and a number of things have been leading me to think about the nature of sports and games and their connection to aggression and violence. Enlightened religion is very big on peace and harmony, but I’ve begun to question…
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Piss Christ | Sanitising Death and Torture
Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ is back in the news again after Christian fundamentalists took a hammer to a print of it in a gallery in France. If you’ve never seen the photograph ‘up close’ then I’d highly recommend it. It’s far more beautiful than the title suggests, and a subtle piece of trickster-work. It is…
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Religion as Theatre :: A Willing Suspension of Disbelief
I’m reading Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare at the moment. It’s a brilliant book, grounding the often mythic character of the bard into his real world of Elizabethan London. I’d highly recommend it. One quote that jumped out at me the other day in within a discussion of Anthony and…