Manual Churchiness And The Art Of Ignorance

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Innovation starts with ignorance because it’s never been done before

The last Los Angeles municipal election had a turnout of around 10 percent. Americans are retreating into isolation — or perhaps isolation plus entertainment — and it affects not just our religious lives but our cultural and political lives, too. The standard pattern for many years was that, during their college years, Americans would drift away from whatever religious background they had, but, after they graduated and entered the workforce — and especially after they married and had children — they would either return to their prior religious affiliation or form a new one.

The age at which one is ready to settle down, assume responsibilities, and form affiliations with a church, political party, or civic organization — or just subscribe to the local newspaper — has gotten older. Even if some young people actually yearn to form serious, lasting affiliations, American society discourages it. His employers specifically told him he was on a six-month contract that might or might not be renewed. The contract could conceivably lead to a permanent position, but they made no promises.

So of course, even as he works that job, he has to be looking for another. That kind of loose relationship is a fragmenting force in American life. It encourages people to depend mostly on themselves and always be ready to move on. Is it possible that community is overrated and that being a freelancer is rewarding in other ways? Some people are isolated for reasons other than economic concerns: I am undoubtedly expressing my own preference here, but I think life is lived more successfully and more harmoniously when it is lived collectively, with stable commitments.

That goes for religious life as well as economic life. Solitude is wonderful and can refresh us as almost nothing else can. And yet solitude is best when it alternates with human interaction. I would agree; and as an American, I, too, admire self-reliance in all realms. But I also see that, as a people, we are often guilty of exaggerating this virtue until we end up in a grim isolation. Mingling with other people, we inevitably encounter those we regard as ignorant or boorish, but even they can disrupt our certainties.

When I hear a sermon in church, I often think that I would prefer the preacher to have focused on a different aspect of the Scripture, yet I learn more from sermons that diverge from my preference. I am made to ponder topics that in the privacy of my mind would simply never have come up.

By signing up for an organized faith, am I not rejecting other religious truths? Well, any choice limits us. OK, you might be a bigamist, but there are limits. And where there are limits, there are choices. The elder Patch provides young Anthony with an enviable living: He has a servant who comes and makes his breakfast.

He eats lunch and dinner at the Ritz every day. He fiddles with writing here and there but never tries to discover whether he has a literary gift. Because his material needs are met, he is free to fritter away most of his time. In this country we assume that religion is a matter of the heart, of inwardness, of how I live rather than of how we live.

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Religious traditions throughout history have had much to say about how we should live, but now there is this other, Western, understanding that the individual is primary. The analogue to this in the Old Testament — and the New, for that matter — is what rabbi and scholar Moshe Greenberg describes in his book Biblical Prose Prayer. Greenberg highlights for discussion all those moments in the Hebrew Bible, and there are many, when a lone individual addresses God directly or hears God speaking to him or her. So I suppose there is a biblical foundation even for the cultural habit of dispensing with organized religion.

Innovation starts with ignorance because it’s never been done before

As paradoxical and illogical as this may sound, I believe one of the main tasks of modern leadership is to protect the '1%' in your organization. You'll find this very hard to believe (at first), but the people in your organization who don't know what they're doing – 'The Ignorants', as I like to.

Would you ever say of yourself that you are spiritual but not religious? I wanted to get laid. I wanted to make a buck. I wanted to be my own boss. Does any of this surprise you? What requires explanation is my joining the Jesuits and thus embracing a life of chastity, poverty, and obedience — that is, no sexual intercourse with anybody not even masturbation, if it matters , no private property or personal income, and a career dedicated to the good of the order.

Because I believed I could make no greater contribution to humankind than to dedicate my life to the preservation and propagation of Catholic Christianity. For example, I saw the value in the various forms of governance within American Protestant churches. The word fellowship , which is dear to almost every strand of American Protestantism, had once made me cringe. I did not want to be cuddled up under some velvet blanket of fellowship. But then I began to perceive the wisdom in it. I moved beyond the content-heavy meditation I had practiced as a young Jesuit and into an empty meditation that led to an awareness that seemed large and airy and liberating.

It was as if I had been ready for such a move without knowing it. I felt drawn to Judaism because of the intellectual vitality of many Jews I met, and the farther I progressed in American intellectual life, the more Jews I got to know. As a Christian I celebrated universality — the Gospel is for everyone — but I came to appreciate the power of a kind of tribal identity: All that aside, I owe a lot to the Jesuits. They dislodged me from the default position of American culture, in which each individual is a customer evaluating all offerings as products to be acquired or not.

I assume the Jesuits also helped foster your deep interest in the Bible, which led you to explore the character of God from a literary perspective in God: Why did you decide to take a literary approach to God? In my Jesuit high school the subject I enjoyed most was literature. Poetry and fiction spoke to me. It had little to say about the poetry of the Psalms, for example. And with regard to God, it was atheistic. They looked for secular, material explanations for everything in the Bible. In the Anchor Bible Dictionary — an enormous, six-volume reference work covering the Old and New Testaments — there is no entry on God.

So there was a vacuum there, and I stepped into it. Believers talk about God. And even if God does not exist, so what? Literature is filled with characters who do not exist. You have a weaker poem as a consequence. To my mind, current Bible scholarship was like Hamlet without the prince.

So I put the prince back in Hamlet. I put God back in the Bible, allowing the work to function as it was intended to function.

Embracing Ignorance

Bible-as-literature courses have been around for decades. Mine was just the latest variant. What I think I did differently was to take a literary approach to the character of God. God is not loving from the start but learns to love along the way. He does not create human beings as an act of love. Evidently he wants a likeness of himself. But does this imply love for the creature about to be created? It might as easily imply curiosity.

Early on, the word love comes up as something God requires of his chosen people, meaning supreme, unquestioning loyalty. Professors of literature received the book warmly. You said a moment ago that Jesus is the most challenging character of all. On the one hand, he is the continuation of God; on the other hand, he seems unlike God. But Jesus, who is God in human form, is a pacifist who goes without protest to his own execution. How do you make literary sense of that? Does that include goddesses? There is archaeological evidence that Yahweh once had a consort called Asherah.

She was a holdover from the mythology of Canaan, the land that the Israelites had conquered, and in places of worship she was represented by a wooden pole. The purpose of the pole is somewhat mysterious: Where did she go? Her personality was absorbed into that of her husband, Yahweh. What makes God a powerful character is his inner turmoil.

From 99% to 1%

The Islamist perpetrators of violence choose to see a license for that violence in their scriptures, but other Muslims read the same scriptures and do not find such license or do not act on it. Christianity was the first instance of such a separation between religious belief and the rest of a culture. Information adapted from WhoSampled. Reblogged this on Alistair Gentry. J ack Miles has had a long and varied history with religion.

He has the capacity for great tenderness, as in the Book of Hosea, where he compares himself to a wronged husband who loves his wife so much that he adopts and cares for the children she has had by another man. But Yahweh also has the capacity for great wrath and vindictiveness, as when, in the First Book of Samuel, he requires the extermination of the Amalekites down to the last man, woman, and suckling babe. In John, chapter 13, Jesus, on the eve of his execution, performs a humble service for his disciples: He washes their dirty feet. Foot-washing is a humble occupation even now; the women who give pedicures rank pretty low in our social hierarchy.

You call me Master and Lord, and rightly; so I am. There are plenty of humble chores that I do leave to other people, but I try to be as willing to serve as to be served. This weekend my church in Santa Ana is having a rummage sale whose proceeds will go to a Christian medical mission in rural Nicaragua. Earlier today, in a back corner of our garage, I found a never-opened set of tire chains, covered in dust.

Was that an inevitable change in the evolution of religion? No, there are polytheistic religions that survive to this day. Hinduism is, in my judgment — I know some Hindus object to this — effectively polytheistic. Some Hindus resolve the multiplicity of gods into the unity of Brahman, the world soul, but that is a monotheism that lives alongside polytheism.

Is it dark energy? What is the ultimate component? Are monotheistic religions more hostile to other religions? In Sri Lanka, for example, the conflict between the Hindu Tamils and the Buddhist Sinhalese has involved truck bombs and torture and killings.

Both faiths might be described as at least somewhat polytheistic. Buddhism, with its many bodhisattvas who help others achieve enlightenment, is a kind of polytheism: And yet these two sides in Sri Lanka fought one another with a bloody ferocity equal to any that monotheism has ever sparked. The Aztec religion was polytheistic, and it was murderously hostile toward the subordinate peoples of the Aztec Empire. I think cruelty and violence are rooted not in monotheism but in human nature. I would say that atheistic totalitarianism, such as appeared in the Soviet Union and in China under Mao in the s, was responsible for some of the greatest evils of the twentieth century.

The Soviet regime killed millions of its own people. The terrible famine in the Ukraine and the numbers who died in the gulag match anything that, say, the Spanish Inquisition ever achieved, all without the assistance of religion. Mao, too, slew millions by inducing famine.

Under both regimes citizens were not permitted to promote any religion. The ruling parties did not attempt to exterminate every believer, but they definitely privileged atheism and persecuted religious leaders. Everything depends on what an individual Muslim does with the received text. The Islamist perpetrators of violence choose to see a license for that violence in their scriptures, but other Muslims read the same scriptures and do not find such license or do not act on it.

Christians and Jews have scriptures that might provide comparable license. In Exodus, Yahweh wrecks the ecology of Egypt and slaughters the firstborn males of a country to make a point. The interpretation of scripture and how it could or should be read is relevant to matters of major geopolitical importance, but international diplomacy generally makes no room for such discussions. As editor of the Norton anthology, you had to decide what religions to include. How did you go about that? After some debate about how we define religion , we decided to anthologize major, living, international religions, thus eliminating from this particular book traditions predominantly confined to a country or region, such as Shinto.

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The hugely important Yoruba tradition is not included because it has no set of generally recognized and employed texts. Ancient but dead religions, such as that of Homeric Greece, are also absent. Minor modern religious movements of all sorts are excluded. We chose to regard Confucianism as a philosophy of governance and aristocratic conduct rather than as a religion.

I wanted to change that so on that tape I used a lot of samples and made my own version of a rap record. I wanted it to be purposely ignorant. What is real rap? Despite referencing Basquiat's "crude" approach, Ignorant Art was followed by more commercial works, Azalea allegedly having "decided to ease off her raunchy style and capture a more mainstream audience. Ignorant Art was recorded in Los Angeles, where Azalea was residing since after migrating from Australia to Miami in prior years. We've come together to save the world from mediocrity. We wanted to see what's rap and what's not," she said.

Azalea replaces her speaking Australian accent by a southern drawl throughout the project. The people who taught me to rap are all from the South and so was the music I had listened to as a teen. During an interview with Complex a few months after the release of the mixtape, Azalea talked about the perception people had of her sexually-charged imagery, "So much of what I do that's controversial in America wouldn't be a big deal back home. America is a highly sexualized society but people are afraid to admit what they like.

When people tell me that I have to be sexy that's demeaning, not powerful When I first came out people said, 'She only raps about her vagina. I talk about many other things. Azalea's machine gun flow win you over. Yup, she's that nice. The unique soundscapes that she chose do nothing but accentuate her very unique style," concluding it's "a very clean, concise listen.

The Guardian called the mixtape "forward thinking" whilst HNHH noted that "Azalea's musical situation is improving with every new release, and Ignorant Art will most definitely help the cause. But neither is 'intelligent'. No detailed credits and personnel were ever officially published for the project. Information adapted from WhoSampled. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Ignorant Art Mixtape by Iggy Azalea.

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