The Fredösphere

Me an' me posse have been trading links lately; I started off with the retro-futuristic ruins of Taiwan; that led to the world's worst building (in North Korea of course) and then someone found this amazing, very slightly racy sci-fi treatment of the same.  Then, someone linked to an old favorite of mine, Jesus Applying for Membership in the UN, and thus we arrive at today's true topic....

I commend to your reading this compelling essay-ette by Tobias Wolff on the topic of the intersection of aesthetics and spirituality in the New Yorker.  (It's the essay that is in the New Yorker, not the spirituality--at least, certainly not exclusively.)  Shown here is the (extraordinary bad--how is it that little old Victorian ladies with a taste for girly Jesuses wearing false beards managed to wrest the tiller of the ship of religious iconography from the hands of people like, well, me for so many years?  Evil little monsters, that's what they are) painting of Jesus mentioned in the essay.  Hat tip to Stefan Beck at Arma Virumque, who has comments worth reading as well.

Labels: VarietiesOfReligiousArt

Ambigrams.  Wow, and double-wow.  Plus, a bearded dragon named Fred.

Today's post is about religion in science fiction.  I wanted to write something that aspired to comprehensiveness, but that vain hope was quickly dashed.  These days there is so much fiction being written and commented on that fits that description.  Just finding all the blogs devoted to R & SF is too big a task.

Ted Chiang, author of the excellent (and award-nominated) The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate displays the stereotypical SF author's attitude:

All science fiction is fundamentally post-religious literature. For those whose minds are shaped by science and technology, the universe is fundamentally knowable. Faith dissolves, replaced by a sense of wonder at the complexity of creation.

Yet Chiang's alternate realities subvert that belief, out of a playful sense of adventure, if for no other reason:

In "Tower of Babylon," a group of miners climb until they reach the vault of heaven, hoping to find God on the other side of the carapace of granite that enfolds their world. "Hell is the Absence of God" tells the tale of one Neil Fisk, whose wife is killed in a visitation by the angel Nathanael to a downtown shopping district. In Neil's thoroughly contemporary world, God exists beyond a doubt. Angels behave like weather phenomena, the miracle of their appearances tracked, quantified, and reported on the nightly news.

Another point of view is represented by this expert who correlates belief in aliens with Jesus and going to the bathroom while employing logical rigor to a degree I don't recall ever encountering before.

Whole blogs devote themselves fully or mostly to religious SF.  Old Testament Space Opera is the first to come to mind.  An impressive list of websites and more impressive steampunky graphics are maintained at Christian Science Fiction & Fantasy Central.  I also found a list of recommended titles and a list of authors by religious affiliation.  (The latter really needs to do some wheat-chaff sorting; I suspect a lot of these guys are nominals, which is a far more important distinction than how they fall out in the dreaded Congregationalist-Methodist schism.  For example, calling that Olaf Stapledon a Quaker is ridiculous in light of the letter he wrote to his unborn great-grandson urging him to fall off the religion wagon without delay.)  Finally, the unfortunately-named topic of "Christian science fiction" has its own Wikipedia page, wherein this tragedy of the publishing business is documented:

Christian bookstores, like some of their secular counterparts are often unsure how to deal with such stories, and may shelve what few they carry under the rather generic and somewhat unhelpful label "futuristic literature".

Catholics are everywhere in SF and speculative fiction generally--call it the Chesterton Effect.  For example, Insidecatholic.com likes the hard-to-categorize Tim Powers, author of Declare.  This link recommends other authors, and makes this observation:

That's a curious thing when you think about it. Science fiction is a genre whose founding fathers and mothers tended very often (though not exclusively, of course) to be the sort of people who were hard-boiled atheists of the Arthur C. Clarke/Isaac Asimov mold -- people who spoke the word "Science" either with a sort of religious reverence or with the sort of stentorian triumphalism of a Thomas Dolby tune. Some of them, like H. G. Wells, managed to achieve both science worship and stentorian triumphalism in their work, writing books which were combinations of fun narrative and some of the preachiest, creakiest, antiquated prophecies in print.

Outgrowing God is indeed a favorite theme of science fiction and fantasy. Evolution/technology/aliens/time travelers from the future/computers/whatnot are always just about to prove that God does not exist, life after death is a fantasy, the soul is a function of matter, man is but a sophisticated meat machine, Jesus never existed, etc.

And yet the astonishing thing is that science fiction and fantasy are absolutely awash in theological speculation. Lots of it is pagan, in the Chestertonian sense. That is, it is an attempt to reach God through the imagination, hampered by the inability to conceive of something truly outside of the created world. The result is a sort of quasi-supernaturalism that acknowledges planes of existence beyond the human, but refuses to entertain the notion of angels and demons.

I'd like to give more attention to religious themes other than Christian ones in SF, but I lack the knowledge or the time.  Once again, Wikipedia is a (meager) starting point.  I tend to hear about mostly the scandalous examples, like the rise of the Jedi Knights in the UK, or (most deliciously) graven images of Kirk and Spock.

SF Signal's symposium on the question, "Is Science Fiction Antithetical to Religion?"  One participant was John C. Wright (see him at livejournal.com) whom I have blogged previously.  John is an interesting case; he's an adult convert from skepticism to Christianity who nevertheless is pessimistic about inserting religious characters into fiction.  Does the new retro-space opera Space Vulture prove him right, or wrong?  Mostly right, I'd say, but there is plenty of contrary evidence from writers with higher ambitions and, frankly, better skill.  Take C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, for example.

Nevertheless, he's right to be skeptical.  Blending religion and SF does go wrong sometimes.  Oh yes, terribly, terribly wrong.

UPDATE:  Calvin College joins the party.

Labels: sci-fi, VarietiesOfReligiousArt

They wanted to get our attention as we drove Interstate 75 through southern Ohio.  They succeeded.  With his head thrown back, this jumbo Jesus may be drawing inspiration from the regrettable laughing Jesus that showed up everywhere back in the 80s.  These people really need to ask themselves a couple of questions before they begin depicting such a touchy subject:  What message am I trying to send here?  What message will I actually end up sending?  With the 10X Jesus in Monroe, Ohio, the unintended message is, "my followers will have more money than taste, and their neighbors will be the losers."  With the laughing Jesus, the message is, "I just saw the Apostle Peter fall right on his butt -- haw, haw, haw!"  Or in the case of the church sign my wife spotted in a more rural part of southern Ohio (it read, "make your eternal reservations today:  smoking or non-smoking") the real message is, "some of my followers will say anything to get attention."

Don't miss the previous installments of The Varieties of Religious Art:  Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, and Part VI.

Labels: VarietiesOfReligiousArt

Via Colby Cosh, this important lesson:  friends don't let friends play chess drunk. His Coshness also meditates on a major attraction of live entertainment, what he calls IWT, the I-Was-There factor:

For another example, consider the lucrative mini-theatres that superannuated musicians and comedians have colonized in Branson, Mo. Yakov Smirnoff and the Gatlin Brothers are still down there slugging away, god love 'em. I figure Branson is the future of entertainment, though it's disguised convincingly as the past. Without the IWT Factor, it's impossible to imagine why people would fill a theatre to see Bobby Vinton. Someday, every star may have his own personal theatre.

I'm certainly getting my own very soon. I hope you're checking PartiallyClips regularly. Wait!  Stop whatever part of the blogösphere that more or less corresponds to the presses!  Sensors indicate a religious art discussion is happening at The Evangelical Outpost.  Thomas Kinkade is being criticized!  Nicely!  C'mon, people, we want a sarcastic edge -- show some steel.  This is the way we like bad religious art handled around here. UPDATE: Don't miss more bloggy goodness on the Kinkade Kwestion in the following post.

Labels: VarietiesOfReligiousArt

Hoo boy, we're back with more cheesy art.  In my previous installment, I covered the religion of Star Trek.  Today we pick on the Guevarolators.  To start it off we admire this bit of sculpture (a larger view is here).  It is an adorable little graven image, suitable for worshiping.  There's nothing like a figurine to reveal the horro-comedy of a movement of mass murderers.

You've all seen the many Che tee shirts so I won't bother linking to them, but I did find some nice art in other media.  This tribute page has the requisite cheesy painting plus some kind of stone wall image that is pretty cool.  Fortunately I don't read Spanish, because that sure looks poetry along side the images -- eek!  Meanwhile, another painting shows Che bathed in the light of the setting sun as he bores a hole into eternity with his earnest glare.

The black velvet triumvirate of Lassie, Elvis and Jesus I understand.  More mysterious is this paint-on-glass grouping of Marylin Monroe, Bruce Lee, Elvis, Che, and Frankenstein.

We also learn that Che loved children.  The big-hearted guy just couldn't get enough of the little dearies.  See it all here, and don't forget to click de foto in case you want to see the groter beeld get a whole lot more krijgen.

Consider this picture of Che meeting Jean-Paul Sartre.  How many ways does Sartre express his submission?  He has the lower seat, his posture is bowed, and even his feet turn in and overlap in an infantile way.  Sycophancy directed toward the brutal and arrogant is something that crops up in all times and places, but how odd that it would be so common among a movement known for its self-righteous denunciation of the powerful.

Labels: VarietiesOfReligiousArt

This latest installment of The Varieties Of Religious Art takes a stroll down Star Trek Lane.  Previous VORAs may be read here, here, here and here. We have shown that religion produces bad art, and that bad art is an indicator for the presence of religion.  This is not an argument against religion (you know me better than that); it is simply an observation that religion serves as an motivator for creating and consuming art, for people who would not otherwise have much to do with art, and who are not prepared to interact with art on purely artistic terms.  They are interested in its didactic function, and that can be deadly.

Thus, I give you exhibit A:  The Star Trek 25th Anniversary Plate.  There are lots more where that came from.  Thus is proved by geometric logic the thesis that Star Trek is a religion.  Ipso facto.  Q.E.D.  Additional proof would be redundant, but a lot of fun, so check out this and this, and then go watch this documentary.

In comparison to these platefuls of last night's dinner vomited back up, Sallman's creations seem models of technical mastery and tasteful restraint.

By demographics and personality, I should be a Trekkie, but I am not.  I do not remember with fondness those who have embarrassed me, and Star Trek routinely left me hot, hot with vicarious embarrassment.  Who could forget the episode where an alien race independently developed the U.S. system of government (with the same flag even!) or the one with Nazis, complete with swastikas and Darth Vader helmets?   I will never forgive them for the the episode where Kirk marvels that a seemingly sophisticated people would worship the "sun," and Lt. Uhura replies, her face radiant with beatific joy, "they're not worshiping the sun, Captain; they're worshiping the Son of God!"

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Finally, let me end on a tangent.  This is something that's been bugging me for decades.  In the transporter room, the controls seem to consist of a set of three faders, like something you would see on a small mixer in a recording studio.  Study the picture here carefully, and you will see them.  The fader concept makes a certain sense, because the transporter action is gradual; there's a period of time where the transported person is half here and half there.  But why three?  Is that for red-green-blue?  The faders are always moved in tandem, but I would love to see what would happen if you moved only one.  Would that transport a red Kirk onto the planet, leaving a cyan Kirk behind on the ship?  I'm just asking.

Labels: VarietiesOfReligiousArt

Previous installments of this series covered the 700-foot tall Jesus and Jesus' Graduation Picture as well as the Pilot Theme in revivalist hymns. Today we take turn down a different path -- a darker path.

This figurine depicts two Red Guards from China's Cultural Revolution forcing a scholar into a humiliating and submissive posture. The dunce cap says "counter-revolutionary" and the board says "Down with Counter-Revolutionary Capitalist." That red bugle thing is supposed to be a megaphone. Go here for several larger views.

The source is the bizarrely named zitantique.com which sells communist memorabilia from China. Go there and see all the posters and ceramics and Little Red Books they have. It appears the owners of this website have no nostalgic feelings for the Cultural Revolution, which is a big relief. Still, there's something deeply creepy about trading in this stuff. A friend of mine who married into a Chinese family said of these figurines ... well, I'm not going to put it into print, so I'll just replace the offensive part with a word chosen at random: frost. With that modification, he said, "this is frosted. Really."

Here's a description from another figurine:

This gruesome large Chinese Color ceramic sculpture depicts one Red Guard holding down an alleged Counter Revolutionary Leading Scholar. A unpleasant reminder of the Cultural Revolution, or otherwise known as the 10 Year Chaos, this sculpture described the common scene that took place during the Cultural Revolution where many scholars and experts were denounced Counter Revolutionary and were released of their posts, many could not stand the humiliation and later committed suicide. The Red Guard, as depicted in this color ceramic sculpture, is seen wearing a Cultural Revolution Liberation Army hat, a Red Guard armband, the Summer Cultural Revolution Red Guard uniform, and holding a gun on one hand, while on another hand, the Cultural Revolution Red Book. His one leg is resting on the shoulder of the Scholar. The Scholar is wearing a dunce cap that says the following: "Down with the Stinky Intellectual" and a white board that says "Counter Revolutionary Leader Scholar."

I hope no one doubts that this is religious art. As so often happens, the religious motivation overwhelms the aesthetic judgment, so that, although some of the posters still have the power to stir the emotions, the ceramics are unfailingly crude and repulsive. This is the original Party of Hate.

So, you ask if we can formulate a new rule: if it is bad art, must it be religious art? Well, when you consider Star Trek ... but I should really save that question for VORA Part V.

Labels: VarietiesOfReligiousArt

Part I dealt with a painting of a 700-ft Christ knocking the U.N.  Part II considered the lingering presence of Jesus' graduation picture.

Part III is all about Christ Our Pilot.



This theme was huge in the art and especially hymnody of 19th century evangelicalism. Now that ocean voyages have very low risk, the metaphor has lost its power, but for our grandparents a storm at sea seemed an intense illustration of life's uncertainties generally.

As I have previously complained about Sallman's art, I'll make the briefest of mentions of this positively creepy depictions of the sailor and Christ--so perfectly calibrated to appeal to the unconscious ideals of a old-ladyfied people of all ages and genders. No, that wasn't the briefest of mentions, was it. Here is the briefest of mentions:  Yuck.

I chose a pilot-themed hymn text for one of my choral settings and I expect I will choose more in the future. I recall Garrison Keillor devoted one of his hymn medleys to this topic.  Titles include Jesus Savior Pilot Me -- With Christ in the Vessel I Can Smile at the Storm -- Sail On! -- for more, see this list of hymns with nautical themes. Christ as an anchor is another important metaphor, and sometimes Christ is a harbor, a Haven of Rest:

I've anchored my soul in the Haven of Rest, I'll sail the wide seas no more; The tempest may sweep o'er the wild, stormy deep, In Jesus I'm safe evermore.

Some of 19th century poetry's most annoying conventions were kept on life support well into the 20th thanks to these revivalist hymns.  Notice the indulgent use of "o'er."  Look around in these hymns and you'll find plenty an "e'er" too.

You know what a ship's pilot is, don't you? He is a specialist based in a harbor who knows its channels intimately. When a ship arrives, the pilot goes out to it by boat and assumes responsibility for steering it safely to its dock.  So the image of Christ the pilot bringing us safely through a storm on the high seas is a bit of a distortion. Oh well. Why did I point that out? Now I've ruined it for you, haven't I.

If you're tired of what you've seen so far and are looking for something with a bit more bite, hang on -- in our next installment I've got a very different kind of art from a very different kind of religion.  Stay tuned for VORA IV.

Labels: VarietiesOfReligiousArt

This being the second in a series of posts about religious art, very broadly defined.

In my previous post on this topic, I promised you Jesus' graduation picture. Here it is. Hey, that's what we called it at the Christian liberal arts college I attended, and really I'm just trying to make fun of a work of art that, c'mon now admit it, deserves some deconstructing.

The artist is Warner Sallman, and the guy is just everywhere. There's a certain generation of churchgoers for whom Sallman is The Source for religious imagery. Go to this list and see Christ At Heart's Door. Is there a church basement anywhere in the civilized world that does not have this picture hanging on the wall? From the same list, see Christ In Gethsemane, Jesus the Children's Friend, or Christ at Dawn. In every case, we get the blue-eyed, jut-jawed winner of the Best Nordic Head contest.

I'm not writing this to make fun; well, not only to make fun. It's just that I think Sallman's ubiquitous vision did real harm. Thanks to his efforts, a certain group of people raised in churches decorated with Sallman prints found it marginally easier to dismiss Christianity as a club for old ladies and the old ladyfied at heart.

From the same link, check out The Boy Christ. If you are not revolted by that kandy-koated kid, there is something wrong with you.

Whew. I'm done. Let me use one more Sallman installment as a transition to a happier topic:

Next time on Varieties of Religious Art: Christ the Pilot! Don't touch that dial!

Labels: VarietiesOfReligiousArt

Thus we begin a series on religious art, very broadly defined.

This painting hung in my family's home for most of my growing-up years. It's not a bad painting in many ways. Click on the image to see a larger version. Look closely at how the forground objects (what there are of them) are depicted, with the paint laid on to create almost jagged edges. The whole thing certainly beats The Painter Of Light in style points. It puts me in an otherworldly mood and makes me ask: who's more real here, Jesus or those spectral shapes on the street going heedlessly about their business?

Even as a child I was amused by the artist's ideas. First, why does Jesus fade away in the lower extremities? I know the artist wanted to avoid showing him interacting with any part of the physical environment -- but in that case, does his knuckle make a noise when he knocks on the wall?

Enough with the childish nitpicking -- but what's with the knocking, anyway? That's where my confusion really originates. I could never avoid the irreverent thought that, by knocking on the U.N., Jesus is saying "hey! I'm still relevant! HEY!" Pathetic, but fortunately not what must have been intended. Still, the whole scene gives the U.N. waaaaay too much credibility. Even as a youngster I understood that the institution housed in Le Courbusier's bastard child was worthy of nothing but contempt. (I fully believe they plan to screw up the whole planet.)

The artist is Harry Anderson. A more popular work of his is called Divine Conselor. Here he seems to have slipped a bit into a more conventional look. I'm afraid his Jesus here owes way more than we would like to Jesus' Graduation Picture. What's that, you say?

Stay tuned.

Labels: VarietiesOfReligiousArt