Defining “Religion” as the Art of the Impossible: A Perspective on Religious Studies and Anthropology

[Friends,

This is a short paper that I am submitting for my anthropology seminar. It is not my best writing, but upon looking at it I realized that it was to blog post as a seminar paper is to journal article, so I decided to put it here. Put 'er there!

Thank God no one is reading,
Vincent]

In the religious studies proseminar –the structural equivalent of ANTH701– Tom Tweed, our department chair, opened our discussion of Mama Lola by saying that it represents sophisticated new trends within the “ethnographic turn” that religious studies has taken since the second World War. Of the several points which could be taken from this off-handed comment, the most important is that religious studies is a thing which can turn towards a discipline, and not a discipline in its own right. Further, I would propose that religious studies -unlike Jewish studies, for instance- is neither a data-set. With this turn the term “religion” came to more prominently designate patterns of life which it had largely neglected; New Religious Movements, religious hybridities, and various social movements which had been left on the far side of a foggy border came to be “religion.” Religious studies, thus, cannot be located by a data-set, but by the ideological proposition of a data-set. Echoing Saussure's call for linguists to define and delimit their field of study, we are those who say that there exists something well designated “religion” and then set out, through the various disciplines that led us to its borders, to examine it. So, in this light, what is an ethnographic turn? Where has post-war cultural anthropology relocated religion? I will wander towards an answer arm-in-arm with three post war theorists, two seminal and one potentially useful, to consider where religion is and where it might be soon.

In “The Structural Study of Myth” Levi Strauss presented religion as a set of “processes which, whatever their apparent differences, belong to the same kind of intellectual operation,” rather than emerging from “inarticulate emotional drives” whence he claimed “Tylor, Frazer, and Durkheim” as psychologizing theorists had traced them.1 Setting aside the fact that all three of these theorists saw the religious impulse as a sort of precursor to science, and a preeminenly logical drive, it is notable the directions in which this conviction brings Levi-Strauss. He is absolutely right, of course, that the analysis of myth as he found it (and perhaps still would find it) lacks significant structures of accountability between various theorists, and that myths can be examined towards nearly any foregone conclusion, but it is questionable whether this is entirely overridden by his para-linguistic reframing,

Given that “myth” functions as a synecdoche for religion in this essay, it is notable that he has relocated its “meaning” not in “the isolated elements which enter into the composition of a myth, but only in the way those elements are combined.2” That is, a story cannot be identified as a myth merely because it contains ostensibly supernatural elements or characters. It must be “bundled” in the manner characteristic of mythical speech, having curiously weak temporal claims. This allows myth -and thus religion- to be located in any kind of story that bears non-propositional temporality. Though Levi-Strauss seemed content to use this method to study only those stories which are commonly identified as religious, it is the necessary ground for those recent theorists like David Chidester or Gary Laderman who explore the religious implications of Disney's narratives and other mass mediated stories.

Continuing along the same trajectory, Geertz' definition of “religion” again opens the field to new areas of inquiry by considering “religion” best demarcated by arrangements rather than contents. If we figure religion as “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men3” it is neither necessary that ghosts be religious, nor that religion be ghostly. This has, of course, drawn critique from those scholars of religion who do not want “everything” (often meaning specifically sports, advertising and other areas of Roland Barthes' specialization) to become religion. However, I have personally found it a quite useful reframing in that it allows for a more adverbial use of “religion” in the case of videogames and other popular cultural phenomena, allowing that certain elements may operate “religiously” even if their total conjuncture is unlikely to be well received as fully “religious.” Toward this sort of work, Geertz' is a fruitful extension of structualist framings of “religion” in that it does not ask about characteristics of the system of symbols, but about the roles it plays in the lives of those engaged with it.

It is notable that both of these efforts, however, have been applied exclusively towards bringing new elements under the label “religion.” In Levi-Strauss' methodology of including all variants of a myth, this makes some sense, but one would think that Geertz would be well applied towards the claim that some phenomenon that had been labeled “religion” was actually incapable of establishing moods and motivations of the right sort.

Niezen's World Beyond Difference follows this same trajectory. Just as Levi-Strauss had located “religion” in a particular sort of para-linguistic interaction rather than in content traditionally termed religious, and as Geertz had brought this consideration into the particulars of lived life by considering the interaction of elements in life, so Niezen locates the religious in structures of global organization. This is an extension in that it retains the focus on the effects (and affects) that these arrangements have upon their members, but obviates the regional focus visible in Geertz' work. By allowing the identifying features of religion to combine without spacial reference, Geertz' spirit-neutral framing of religion is empowered to explain many movements that could not have been discussed otherwise, not only including patterns of global capitalism and Fundamentalism in the present, but even, for instance, patterns of historical Catholicism. I have designated this a “potentially useful” text, however, because it, like much work in anthropology, expounds its theories of religion without ever demarcating its object clearly.

The most explicit descriptions of “religion” here, however, are groups whose religious nature seems to largely emerge from the fact that their claimed precedents were designated so by Niezen's. The “religious dissension” he describes seems to be only a form of dissent shared among various types of groups, but which is being enjoined here by Muslims.4

But there are glimmerings of a much more useful understanding of “religion” in this work that deserves to be unearthed. Consider his reflections on the strong sense of “Globalization,” the process of accelerating global networking irrespective of whether its specific nature is basic or superstructural: “For some, the rapid pace of change attributed to globalization is a source of almost millenarian hope, an expectation of the end of history... It is almost a secular source of spiritual awe that rules human fate beyond the reach of petition or salvation.5”

My only complaint about this location of religion is Niezen's conservative use of “almost.” There is nothing “almost” about it, particularly if this is only “for some:” In my ethnographic work with the Ordo Templi Orientis in Atlanta, a group who envisions the world as having entered a New Aeon of human interconnection in autonomy in 1904, the internet was positively proof of their apocalypic doctrines; Timothy Leary, in Chaos and Cyber Culture explicitly detailed the net age as the new world which prophecy had been unable to articulate clearly; The Kabbalah Centre, likewise, has framed globalized modernity as the age which is properly prepared for the messiah.

But Niezen's “for some” is by no means insignificant. All of the groups I have detailed are constituted largely by internet culture, the OTO managing their 3000 members and disproportionately large sphere of influence in the New Age movement through podcasting and web archives, Leary's followers continuing to publish his texts online, and the Kabbalah Centre clustering a network of perhaps millions around their own online store. These groups are religious with regard to their discourse on globalization both because they have framed the current configuration “mythically” through Levi-Straussian atemporality -these things were explained by ancient prophecy much as they currently being recounted on the news- and because their members are engaged with them in the ways that Geertz would designate “religious.”

The work that remains to be done in demarcating the bounds of “religion” is precisely that which Niezen may not have realized he was doing by writing “for some.” The bounds of “religion” usefully pushed out by (post)structuralism have in fact come to encompass nearly everything, and are beginning to take on the uncritical possibility which Levi-Strauss had seen in the study of myth. The next task is to ask for whom various arrangements actually act on their constituent members as any given theorist has decided to characterize “religion.” If the term is to encompass groups like the Kabbalah Centre which describes itself as the opposite of a religion, should they behave (as, I argue, the Centre does) “religiously,” the possibility must be left open that some groups commonly so designated may need to be reclassified. This need not mean, of course, that anyone say “Methodism is not a religion.” My best prediction is that a structuralist drive focused on affective and network structures could eventually clarify religious arrangements down into more workable units by emphasizing specific affective and network structures: “Methodism includes sixteen religions.” It is a work worth doing, and one towards which it seems religious studies is turning.

-notes-
1. Claude Levi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 68, No. 270 (Oct. - Dec., 1955), 428.
2. Levi-Strauss, 431.
3. Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System” in The Interpretation of Cultures, 88.
4. Niezen, 65.
5. Niezen, 36.

And Experiments

Friends,

The effort following the thyspace group has been a Facebook type group on a similar attempt to plant a node for digital and progressive Christianity. This, incidentally, worked only slightly less terribly [ http://unc.facebook.com/group.php?gid=15020685067 ]. Time, I suppose to reconfigure the way I am imagining internet nodes.

Good to think,
Vincent

An experiment

Hello friends,
The application of Deleuze to that music video seemed like a fine way to resume this strange little effort, didn't it? Oh well, you can't win them all. As it turns out, Deleuze's Cinema is one of those books that I encounter periodically and have to admit I cannot read. I can't, not now. (Though his claim that watching The Passion of Joan of Arc proves the existence of a "non-psychological spirit" in the human seems to be hinting at something that needs to be said, and said quickly, to me.) So I am going to return to the thousand tiny projects that made this seem like a useful project in the first place. I doubt anyone will mind.

I have recently set out to try a meta-theological, meta-ecclesiastical (meta-heretical would not be entirely unfair) experiment on the new Christian social service "Thyspace." Perhaps it will be worth writing about here:

Critical Mass: A Meeting Place for Christians with Unpopular Questions
“COME, LET US REASON TOGETHER” -Isaiah 1:18-

This is a group for Christians without a sense of their place in The Body because the questions that occupy their thoughts and prayers are not only unanswerable, but even unaskable within their communities.

Here Christians can meet up to discuss all of the intellectual and theological matters not (or not adequately) discussed within the narrow spectrum of our denominations. And can do so without being pressured to accept any answer that does not satisfy their intellect.

The commitment here is to the proposition that just as The Body encompasses Catholics, Congregationalists, and Quakers, just so does it have room for the many creative theologies which are currently adrift without communities. This is a meta-group, one that hopes to serve as a rally-point around which people can meet, and begin conversations that can continue here and elsewhere.

Thus, this group invites all of those who would like to meet to discuss Christian perspecives on (and not merely against) evolution or atomism, pan(en)theism or deism, agnosticism/fideism or monism, anarchism or feminism, radical literalism or radical anti-literalism... or any of the other theological and intellectual visions which are legitimate possibilities within our shared heritage.

That also means that this is not a group for would-be heresy hunters who want to tell others that their Christianities are invalid. Nor is it a group for those who do not consider themselves Christian (may they find their peace). There is a forum for efforts to draw people in to a denomination or push them out of Christianity entirely. That forum can be found (unfortunately) in most churches and nearly everywhere else.

Any Christian who feels alone in their intellectual pursuits, any Christian who thought there was no community in which they could think freely (and who does not want to use such a forum to promote hatred of other people, whether Christian or otherwise) is welcome here.
----------------------------------------------------

Admittedly, this is an effort to repair the past: I was eighteen when I was first traumatized by Darwin and by the presumption that women are men's equals in all senses relevant for politics or theology (that is, this world or any other). I was traumatized, of course, because these ideas struck me as both entirely convincing and absolutely impossible to discuss within the frame of my church. I was sent back, sore with questions, to the Bible. My fissure was then quickly opened into a complete fracture by the fact that the cosmological (and occasionally angelological) questions that seemed necessary parts of the Bible stories at hand were avoided by everyone from whom I sought answers. I spent five years convinced that I could not call myself a Christian, before realizing that every issue that was killing me has been answered in many different (and occasionally satisfying) directions by generations of Christians from whom I was kept. Whether this was through malice or ignorance hardly matters now; if the medium is the message the internet itself may be a balm for either. Maybe a wikilisiology will sustain Christians who thought they had the sin of inventing and the sad burden of sustaining their heresy alone.

Of course, this could fail in a dozen ways: "Thyspace" could never really catch on; I could be thrown off (though I can hardly imagine a clearly worded rebuttal for this sort of group as a whole); No one within the thyspace community could care or want to join. But the visions for success are messy enough that simple failure is hardly a worry.

Maybe there will be nothing to report, but if this becomes beautiful (or otherwise), I will tell you about it.

Love always,
Vincent

Oh yes, and I've learned something.

I am setting out to coherently discuss (as an experiment in my apprehension of Deleuze) a single goddamned music video. This is me reopening this file. I will be writing here more often. So, my homework:
Yeah,
Vincent

Art Games 1

Friends,

The basic assumption of this whole project is that religion is enscribed in whatever religious people have close at hand. Those who make speeches, write symphonies, or paint on paper plates with string sometimes do it with religious themes, and sometimes even as a religious practice, and they do it because that is what they can do with what is around. The digital is the question only because we have way too many ones and zeroes. But because it shows up everyplace, there is no reason to say that religion is better expressed in high (that is, elite and elitist) art than in low (that is, popular and populous) art. It would be well argued that the Christianity owes its vitality (for better and worse) more to crappy popular sermons than to the Sistine Chapel. Remember also that much of the Bible was certainly low (at least functional and popular) before it became the highest art of all. But the high does effect ranges of culture and last over periods of time inacessable to the low, and since we are turning our attention to different sorts of media, it is fair to wonder how the division between high and low art will affect the mediation of religion. For now I am particularly curious why videogame designers are not yet producing high art. Can they? Would it change the possibilities for digitally mediated religion if they were to? If Eternal Forces is a crappy popular sermon of a game (and the Wisdom Tree masterpieces of the 80s and 90s were almost blasphemous jokes), what has to happen before Sega's "David" can be produced? (This post is about games as a segue to later thinking about relgion, so if that bores you, please go bore yourself someplace else.)

But, you say, videogame art has already arrived! If art is a matter of representation filtered through the perspective of the individual creator (the view held by some Objectivists and "culture decay" theorists), if a good but simple still life is art, surely the attention to representational detail and subtle creative adjustment in even a run of the mill fighting game keeps up. And if art is about drawing the audience into an emotional relationship with the subject matter, wasn't Eternal Darkness' effort to make the player slowly lose their mind in time with the main character a moment of art (cf. Eternal Darkness review )?

The short answer is, I don't really want to argue about what is and is not art, maybe a strange position for this particular blog, but I don't. There are so many definitions of art (like "religion" or anything else that matters to at least one whole department at at least one university) that I am sure one can find examples for several of them in videogames, but that does not make videogames meaningfully art-like. It only means they are fair targets for the sort of youthful sophisty that finds art (or religion) on the fronts of cereal boxes, and often in the prizes inside.

The point is that beyond the committed faithful, those basement dwellers who want to say that Final Fantasy 7 is art, perhaps convinced that mythological themes are incredibly rare, and the aforementioned well meaning young people, there is no widespread recognition of any videogame as art. The question is not art, but high art, socially certified art. And to say that art world's indifference to videogames is only prejudicial conservatism is hardly helpful. Those who publicly recognize art have been quite willing in recent years to discuss video installations, and even some interactive digital media when presented in installation. But not videogames as gamers tend to recognize them. (For some comments on the subject which have a fine time essentializing art and complaining of antigamerism see: Are Video Games Art?)

Videogames will be high art when enough people start recognizing the artgame as a meaningful category, a change which I say will take two major changes. First, high art is a classed phenomena. The paradox is that at present high art is by and large not that produced by the wealthy, but by the poor, or atleast by a class of artisans separate from the art-buying class. The wealthiest legally recognized individuals in our culture are corporations, and when they make art they do it for the widest possible audience, necessarily classing the art as popular and thus low. Because high art is art made by the obscure but talented for the gourmet tastes of the wealthy, it seems unlikely that present videogame production models will ever produce high art at all. Anyway, can only one person own a videogame? Can it be something purchased at a premium, stored and treasured? The democritizing power of digital media continues those trends Walter Benjamin pointed out back when the issue was only copying of originals. ( "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction") Mechanical reproduction moved the primary question of artsiness from ownership to originality, and digital (re)production is moving it from originality to a sort of existential "authenticity." The digital original is always already a copy. Digital art will only be high when it can somehow be made rare.

Secondly, we will only recognize these videogames when works begin to emerge which apply common (perhaps even trite) conventions of high art, in format or in content. But again, there is no reason to whine; this is just how it works. We need several examples that will draw the eye of art scholars and connoisseurs so a conversation can begin, and so the rare breed of programmer artists (I know at least two... are you listening?) can start working to produce certified and interactive high art. Odds are that this will not mean that either the novel or the still life will be made digital (The Da Vinci Code game and Myst come close enough to each of these). Perhaps when art films rather than action flicks and kids movies are adapted as games we will start seeing it. Moreover, it will be necessary that the works not model after pre-certified art so fully that no one identifies them as games. Hypertext novels and poems have already become fairly commonplace and have already begun keeping interprising literary scholars awake at night, but neither form are recognized widely as "games."

Recently I have come across some examples which work to fit both the classed and the thematic requirements for high videogame art ( "Art Games Network" http://www.artificial.dk/articles/artgamesnetworks.htm). And even here you can rightly ask which of these qualify as either games or art. Pac Mondrian (not to be confused with the cosplay character, who is undoubtably art) is a game loosely based on art, but hardly any more a digital artgame than drawing mustaches on reproductions of paintings would be an analog artgame. The same, I suppose, could be said of Natalie Bookchin's adaptation of Borges' "The Intruder," but because it is the single most dramatic dramatic reading of a short story I have ever encountered, I think it deserves particular mention at least as a notable continuation of that tradition. Play it. The Super Mario clouds and Distellamap, may or may not be art, but they are from games, not games in their own right. I recommend all of you dig through the rest of these and think about whether any of them could ever be recognized as art outside of gaming circles. And while you are at it, go and see The Polyphonic Spree's "The Quest for the Rest" , and ( "Operation Urban Terrain" ), a deeply inventive something which strains between game, protest, and artform. Of course, there remains the problem of rarity in all of these cases, but for now obscurity should serve about the same function as would private ownership. Maybe digital high art will only last as long as anything else digital, remaining high for a time and suddenly falling into pop culture banality once people know they are interested.

Frankly, I can't say anything else until I have more sincere candidates. You can only say so much about non-existence. If you have some artgames that have a shot, please send me links. I'd love to make a nice list.

Cheers,
Vince(nt)

Video Theology 1.1

So Friends,

In my awkward prologue to this strange thing, I did more ranting than explaining, leaving even the idea of "video-theology" dreadfully unclear, so my work is cut out for me now. I will start at the end. I claimed that inspired video-scripture was coming, that we would soon have to deal with the Divine Word in unprecedented forms and have to find new exigetical tools for playing with and living through (or even around) it. Not only will people start talking about movies, hypertexts, and videogames as Bible, but I think they already have, if in hushed tones. First I guess we should think about why, later we'll deal with how.

My professor in Hebrew Bible told us, with no little touch of irony, that it was amazing that when few enough Jews could read Hebrew, God decided to give them an authoritative and personally inspired Greek version. And when few enough could read Greek, God inspired the Aramaic targumim [translations]. We can follow this amazing tendency of God to accomodate illiteracy further still, through the Latin Vulgate [meaning, of course, in "common language"], past Luther's German translation, and right up to the KJV1611, which so many Evangelical Christians with their apparently forgivable monoliteracy maintain is the inerrant Word.

And, yes, I am being facetious and a little snide. I am personally not convinced that God does this, for all I know God is really sticking with the lost and perhaps irreconcilable tatters of what was later shuffled into scriptures. There is no reason to believe that God is necessarily accomodating on this one. Consider how the first set of Ten Commandments had been written by God personally [Exodus 32:16], but when Moses smashed them, though God said more would be divinely inscribed [34:1], Moses had to write the second copy himself anyway [34:28]. And these new Commandments, the only ones the Bible calls "the Ten Commandments," by the way, are neither like those God wrote personally, nor like those which Dr. Laura and certain judges think all of us should take very seriously. Go and look at the Commandments which the Bible actually calls the big 10, friends, you may be surprised. In any case, there is precedent for God deciding that when we ruin the inspired Word it is mostly our business to fix it up, and sometimes that involves shifts which hardly scream "inerrant."

But what matters here is not what God actually does, what matters is that many people who talk about Bible, perhaps even most people who have done that since the first century BC, have thought that God is quite willing to do inspire translations, and with serious theological consequences. Leaving aside specific issues of what should be translated as "young woman" and what should be translated as "virgin" for the moment, consider how many Christian groups, even those who read more contemporary translations, use a distinct register of speech for prayer liberally peppered with thees and thines. And it was with translation into English that the Bible was peopled with unicorns [Psalm 92:10, among others], though the Hebrew certainly had its own menagerie of monsters which sometimes became creatures as docile as goats through the miracle of translation [cf. Lev. 17:7]. Going back further, consider the fact that some Jews have drawn inspiration even from the shapes of the Hebrew letters, which are certainly not the first script in which the Torah was patched out. Translation matters. And it matters especially when it is scripture, because the accidents of translation can gain the status of the earlier text.

So what? The so what is that the issue is no longer what people read, but whether people read, and if they read, how they read. Movies and videogames, textmessages websites and billboards give us most of what we think we read, but maybe we read more cereal packages and t-shirts in a day than all of those things combined. The book is changing.

Which not to say that the good old codex [the bound book, the "biblion"] is totally outdated. We are making more books than we know how to think about, but that is part of why the Bible as Biblion is becoming a problem. With the present glut of books, the canon is falling apart. We can establish a common literature only where powerful institutions tell us what matters; at school we read Huck Finn and The Scarlet Letter, at Church we read hymnals and Bible, and they give us things to talk about, and a language to talk about them in, but these institutions are competing with modes of media distribution like nothing ever seen before. The tools behind Fox are not like early modern pampleteering, or even like modern propagandizing. Our common language is being forged in a sprawling arms-race between organizations that can strategically unveil new idioms at will all over the world. And the biblion is only the smallest part of what they are doing, so increaasingly it is only the smallest part of what WE are doing.

We, friends, cannot be disentangled from those organizations that are each fighting to teach us first what we already wanted to say we knew. Once enough of us want media, edible media, watchable media, wearable media, it begins to exist. And if we do not yet want media that seems to follow from our current wants, we are given it anyway to see what we think. So, whether God is listening and whether God will give a world of movie-quoters a movie-Bible is hardly the question. Unless God intervened to stop it, it was going to come. Whether God has tried to stop it is something to think about later, but once a few thousand people to started wanting their Bible to be as shiny as their movies, it began arriving.

Movies like The Ten Commandments and The Prince of Egypt are not quite the point, though. No large outcry pushed these movies towards canonical status so they were only on topic of Bible, not Bible proper. These are two totally distinct types of religious media, secondary and primary texts. Movies about the Bible are really only a matter of manuscript illumination, not really more interesting than The Precious Moments Bible (oh yeah, really), because the images cannot be unpacked for new scriptural data. Moses did not sing that song, but he is also not Charlton Heston, nor a doe-eyed Precious Moments hydrocephalus, and few if any are shocked or scandalized.

The first real sign which I can think of of the canonization of video is, strangely, The Last Temptation of Christ. When the movie was released in 1988 its depiction (though, everyone must remember, depiction of a dream) of Jesus having sex raised an uproar. It was driven out of several theatres for it, but most importantly Protesters (caps intentional, if a little unfair) marched around with signs that said "This movie lies!" Of course it lies! Jesus did not have that dream, like Moses looked nothing like Charlton Heston! The complaint is not interesting. The point is that somewhere around here, somewhere around the cable television boom, people began complaining about the lack of divine inspiration in movies. The complaint that this movie was not true, it seems, contains in it the notion that such questions are worth asking; that a True movie was thinkable. It took a few years, but of course it came. Of course.

We have no way of knowing whether the Pope really said "It is as it was" about the Passion of the Christ (though if he did we can only hope that the myth of him doing so in Latin is true too), but it cannot be denied that many Protestant churches did so. In groups that were talking about a "culture war" where the other side (yes, ALWAYS the other side. For now there is only one side in the culture-war, though maybe we should reconsider that too) was Jewish-inclusive and anti-Christian, the claims of antisemitism and anachronism actually bolstered the movie's truthiness to the point of Inspiration. It became scripture because it is shit. And it will happen again, because we still want it. Until the annunciation of Mary's surprising but less-than-mysterious pregnancy, it seemed that The Nativity Story was a real contender. Imagine if it had been canonized, friends. If not for teenage pregnancy, if it also had been "as it was," we would have to decide why the Temple service was in later Rabbinic idiom, why God spoke like a smug 30 year-old, and where all of that corn came from. The corn would have to be read as an unsung miracle. I say we should be ready with our shit-scraping tools close at hand.

So what? How did the translation change the text? How is pouring the old wine of scripture into the new skins of digital media changing that media? That is what I am trying to think about here, and what I am sharing as I think it. So, I guess there will be more later.

Cheers,
Vince(nt)

Video Theology 0

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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LYRICS:
When ink and pen in hands of men
Inscribe your form, bipedal P
They draw an altar on which
God has slaughtered all stability
No eyes could ever soak in all the places you anoint
And yet to see you all at once we only need the Â..
Flirting with infinity, your geometric progeny
That fit inside you oh so tight
With triangles that feel so right

(3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974 94459)

Your ever-constant homily says flaw is discipline
The patron saint of imperfection frees us from our sin
And if our transcendental lift shall find a final floor
Then Man will know the death of God where wonder was before

Yeah, I know this Pi shit backwards and forwards
Check it out

I did three chicks then I pointed at the door
A girl entered in so that made it four
I snapped one time in came another five
Add 'em all up and that makes nine
The average age 26.5
Now that's what I call gettin' some pi
Five of the chicks wore 6-inch heels
Two of the nine squealed like seals
514 was the area code
Quebec, Canada my winter abode
And my 1.3 million dollar chalet
Pi backwards, pi forwards, all night and all day

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939 9375105820974944 5923078164062862089986280348253421170679
821480865132823066470938446095505822317253594081284811174502 84502(fade out)