Daily Links – 1.8.10

Thoughts on Landscape
From Englewood Review of Books, on Frank Gohlke’s new book:

…photographs of landscapes refer to the embodied practices and relationships of particular people in particular places. Photographs, more so than other mediums, are bound to their places in ways that are “vivid, precise, intimate, local” (213) by sheer virtue of how the mechanism of the camera reproduces, but Gohlke would like to reinforce the significance of these adjectives as they relate to his work as a landscape photographer: “In other times and places there has been a real conversation between people and the spaces they occupied; what people did, the kinds of places they created, had something to do with the messages they received from their surroundings about the effects of actions already taken…I would like to suggest that one function of landscape art in the late twentieth century is to help restore that lost faculty, if nothing else, by providing examples of careful listening” (179).

Zizek Quote
“We are thus simultaneously less free and more free than we think: we are thoroughly passive determined by and dependant on the past, but we have the freedom to define the scope of this determination, that is, to (over)determine the past which will determine us.” -Zizek from In Defense of Lost Causes

Jesus in Afghanistan
Is Jesus alive and well in Afghanistan? I think the linked story is quite a good one in terms of understanding Jesus’ teaching in a modern context.

Reading the Bible Historically and Theologically
James Merrick has written a helpful post on describing some of the problems he faced reading the Bible both historically and thelogically. I quote it here because it mirrors many of my own thoughts on the subject:

While I was learning Greek during my undergraduate, I remember undergoing with my fellow students a crisis. The crisis was simply this: having encountered something of the objectivity of the text, the Bible no longer seemed to be a devotional book. The discovery of its objectivity meant my becoming estranged from it, for no other reason than the fact that now what controlled the meaning was no longer my questions or personal struggles, but those of the author, his language, the historical context and the original readers’ hermeneutical horizon. Moreover, the class’s impression, voiced to our professor, was that the Bible felt rather uninspirational, plain and mechanic, not like the living and active Word. Indeed, what determined the text’s meaning came to be expected and calculated once the reader had a sense for the cultural background and language.

Reflecting on it later in seminary, it became rather obvious that what I was experiencing was the breaking of the habit of domesticating the Bible, the happy coincidence of self with text. What I lost was the ability to think of the Bible as receiving a text message from God. It was not the Spirit’s work that made the Bible seem so dynamic and illuminating, I realized, but the inevitable excitement that attends the reading of oneself into something of ultimate significance. If one assumes that the Bible is a personal note from God about how to live your individual life and, further, that having this secret knowledge makes you better than all the people who don’t read the Bible, then one is bound to feel empowered and encouraged. What made the Bible seem so devotional in the first place was not its content, but simply the devotional style of reading itself; the devotional effects were due to the bliss that regularly accompanies ignorance. Whatever the demerits of grammatical-historical exegesis, it at least taught me to stop using the Bible as a means for self-affirmation and shallow piety. And this is why to this day I resist extreme forms of reader response interpretation and constructivism which deny history and its bearing upon meaning.

Rob Bell on Youth Ministry
(HT: Jason)

Up to Our Steeples in Politics
(HT: Halden)

“Katallagete! “Be reconciled,” since we are all already reconciled in Christ’s “purpose in dying for all.” This is the only word the Christian brings to the broken relationships between and among men. Because the source of reconciliation, the Word made flesh, “came to dwell among us,” we have no doubt about where the service of reconciliation ought to lead: not into the falsely secure world of a Christendom which denies the work of the Lord by its defensiveness and isolation, but into the genuinely insecure world of politics, wars, poverty, hunger, violence and insurrection — that is, the world into which Christ came and lived, by which he was murdered, and for which he was raised to life.” -Will Campbell and James Holloway