You could say that there are two very discrete and almost oppositional places where a sculpture belongs. One is physical: in a landscape or a room, and the other is in the imagination of the viewer, in his/her experience and memory. They are equally important and in many senses the work is there waiting - almost like a trap - for the life of the viewer to come and fill it, or inhabit it. And then once "captured" the art - or its arising - inhabits him or her.
Antony Gormley, 2001, quoted in exhibition guide to Antony Gormley: Blind Light
It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions. The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind as a great mirror, containing various representations - some accurate, some not - and capable of being studied by pure, non-empirical methods. Without the notion of the mind as mirror, the notion of knowledge as accuracy of representation would not have suggested itself. Without this latter notion, the strategy common to Descartes and Kant - getting more accurate representations by inspecting, repairing, and polishing the mirror, so to speak - would not have made sense. Without this strategy in mind, recent claims that philosophy could consist of ‘conceptual analysis’ or ‘phenomenlogical analysis’ or ‘explication of meanings’ or examination of ‘the logic of or language’ or of ‘the structure of the constituting activity of consciousness’ would not have made sense.
Richard Rorty, ‘Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature’, p. 12
It was indeed, according to the Talmud, the Jews who were primarily responsible for Jesus' execution, which is why (contrary to all the evidence) he was stoned - a Jewish punishment - rather than crucified. The Jews who produced these Talmudic traditions were more than happy to accept responsibility, since they believed Jesus was a heretic and blasphemer who thoroughly deserved his fate: "the Roman governor wanted to set him free, but we did not give in. he was a blasphemer and idolater, and although the Romans probably could not care less, we insisted that he get what he deserved. We even convinced the Roman gobernor [more precisely: forced him to accept] that this heretic and impostor needed to be executed - and we are proud of it.".
It should be stressed that there is no reason whatever to think that any of these allegations is true: they all date from long after the time at which any information about Jesus, independant of that in the Gospels, was available.
John Barton, Times Literary Supplement, June 15 2007.
I was in a Zagreb hospital recently and happened to come across an acquaintance from Sarajevo. He looked pretty wretched: right leg in plaster, left arm bandaged, a mass of dark bruises ...
‘My God ...’ I exclaimed, because I didn't know what else to say.
‘I've just come from Sarajevo...’ he said.
‘My God...’ I shook my head. ‘So, how did this happen?’ I asked. I couldn't have asked a stupider question.
‘I'll tell you, but promise you won't tell anyone...’
I nodded, filled with a sense of guilt and deep compassion for my acquaintance from Sarajevo.
‘I was sitting in my room, when suddenly - wham - a grenade flew in through the open window ...’
‘And then?!’ I gasped.
‘Nothing. It didn't explode ... I picked it up ... and threw it out of the window, what else could I have done ...’
‘And then?!’
‘Nothing. It exploded and took off the front wall...’
‘And then?!’
‘Nothing. I peered out through the broken wall of the room and fell, from the second floor ... into the street.’
‘And then?!’
‘Nothing. I smashed myself up...’.
Dubravka Ugresic, ‘The Culture of Lies’, trans. Celia Hawkesworth, pp. 66-67.
My copy of this remarkable collection of liturgies and prayers written by the former warden of Iona Abbey is falling apart. It’s not just a resource for those who lead worship but an outstandingly beautiful prayer-book for anyone who is searching for resonant and truthful prayers.
In the Iona tradition, these prayers fuse material and spiritual in a seamless robe of words and phrases. Some of Newell's phrases, for example "the fears in us that have not yet been cast out by love" have moved me -and others- to tears in a moment of recognition and gratitude.
Here Newell has provided communion liturgies and daily offices based on the writers of both Old and New Testaments. The prayers can be used in their entirety, or, as I have tended to use them, as springboards for my own prayers and liturgies in public and in private.
The death knell for French bread was sounded many times in the national press; prematurely, as it turned out, because it is now possible to buy bread of the finest artisanal quality again, all over Paris; bread whose crust crackles with the aroma of honey and gingerbread and which does not lose its charms after only a few hours ...
... from the mid-1990s, a new generation of bakers were giving fresh dignity to the profession. Their inspiration was Lionel Poilâne, who had never stopped making bread with integrity, practising what he called "retro-innovation", developing new techniques for making bread in the old traditions. Poilâne's signature loaf was the miche, a spendid sourdough orb. The new retro-innovators such as Eric Kayser and Dominque Saibron, both bakers with shops on the rue Monge in the Latin Quarter, turned their hands to reinventing the baguette, making slow-rise versions without additives, using industrial mixers but set to a gentle speed.
...Kayser has even invented something which Parmentier in the eighteenth century only imagined - a sourdough ferment which is gastronomically ideal without enslaving the baker. "Fermento-levain" is a liquid leaven machine which churns out a constant flow of reliable sourdough, giving Kayser's baguette its "delectable" qualities - the toasty crust and hazelnutty crumb. Whatever yearning one might feel for the bread of the eightennth century, the bread made by Kayser and his contemporaries is better. It is probably the best bread that France has ever tasted, because it is made by thinking men and women who have not sacrificed themselves to the tyranny of dough.
Bee Wilson, Times Literary Supplement, June 8 2007. Full text at the Times Online website.
According to research by Professor Ray Pahl, a sociologist at Essex University's Institute for Social and Economic Research, the average Briton has 18 friends of varying degrees of closeness and many survive perfectly well without a "best" friend.
Laura Barton, ‘The Guardian’: G2, 6 June 2007. Full text at the Guardian Unlimited website.
He [Macquarrie] ... affirms - and rightly so, I am convinced - that the understanding of man developed in existentialist philosophy possesses a certain kinship with the understanding that is contained implicitly in the New Testament. Thus he acknowledges my interpretation of the New Testament to be one that is valid in principle.
Rudolf Bultmann, Foreword to John Macquarrie, ‘An Existentialist Theology’.
The theologians were trying to find a point of entry into the contemporary mind in order that they might be able to present the Christian faith in terms intelligible to their own age. They therefore made use of current philosophical concepts even when these were drawn from systems of thought quite alien to Christianity...
Clearly, however, there are grave dangers in this way of theologizing. The peril is threefold. Preoccupation with a secular philosophy and the employment of it in the interpretation of Christian faith may easily lead to the distortion of Christian teaching through the over-emphasis of those elements in it which happen to be specially congenial to the philosophy concerned. Or, again, ideas quite foreign to Christianity may slip into its theology whilst masquerading under the guise of traditional Christian terminology. At worst, there may be a plain accommodation of the Christian faith to the prevailing philosophical fashion of the age.
John Macquarrie, ‘An Existentialist Theology’, pp. 3-4.
Bultmann is right in claiming that only the Word - and that means the Word of God - can fulfil the function which Heidegger referred to conscience. That function is to summon man out of his fallen existence and set him before his authentic possiblity. It is therefore quite literally the Word of life.
John Macquarrie, ‘An Existentialist Theology’, p. 211.
Psychology, as an empirical science, describes the human condition as it is. The philosophical and theological anthropologies, however, criticize the actual human condition. In order to do so, they must have accepted, either implicitly or explicitly, some norms or criteria of what it means to be a human person. They must therefore have also concerned themselves with exploring the possibilities of the human condition. They are concerned not simply with describing human nature as something given, but with the realization of human nature as an emerging reality.
I should say, however, that I hold no brief for either theologians or philosophers who despise empirical studies of the human. Perhaps the Marxists have been the worst offenders in this matter. Ernst Bloch, for instance, talks about ‘crawling empiricism’. Presumably, it is said to be ‘crawling’ because it describes humanity as it is rather than saying what it ought to be, that is to say, it pays homage to the actual rather than to some ideal. But while I would agree with Bloch that the study of the human must go beyond the empirically given, it cannot afford to neglect this, unless it is to get lost in utopianism, as does in fact happen in Bloch's own case. Empirical studies reveal the raw materials, so to speak, out of which humanity must be constructed, and it is important to know about these. Marx may have been right in saying that the philosopher's business is not just to describe the world but to change it, but it would be reckless and unrealistic to try to change the world without previously listening to those who have made a careful attempt to describe things as they actually are.
John Macquarrie, ‘In Search of Humanity’, pp. 3 - 4.
For many of the philosophical categories employed in this book, I am indebted to the writings of Heidegger. As it seems to me, his way of philosophizing and the concepts he has developed provide the basis for a viable twentieth-century ("natural") theology, and can be used further for the articulation and elucidation of the whole body of Christian truth in a contemporary way. This does not mean in the very slightest that our theology is being made subservient to a philosophy; but it does mean that, like theologians of the past, we can avail ourselves of such current philosophical work as will best serve to express the faith in terms that communciate with the secular culture of our time.
John Macquarrie, ‘Principles of Christian Theology’, revised edition (1977), p. vii.
In the account of revelation given here, it is assumed that the person who receives the revelation sees and hears no more than any other person in the situation might see and hear. What is revealed is not another being, over and above those that can be perceived by anyone. Rather, one should say that the person who receives the revelation sees the same things in a different way. We might say that he sees them in depth, though this expression is in danger of becoming trivialized.
John Macquarrie, ‘Principles of Christian Theology’, revised edition (1977), p. 89.
Une oeuvre d'homme n'est rien d'autre que ce long cheminement pour retrouver par les détours de l'art les deux ou trois images simples et grandes sur lesquelles le coeur une première fois s'est ouvert.
Albert Camus, ‘L'Envers et L'Endroit’, préface. First seen by me in English translation at the Finnish music website Phinniweb.
Twenty-one of the best from my own collection:
An absence of waiters
A rash of dermatologists
A should of agony aunts
A crop of barbers
A clutch of car mechanics
A vat of chancellors
A bout of estimates
An annoyance of mobile phones
A lot of auctioneers
A bumble of beekeepers
A flutter of gamblers
A body of pathologists
A complex of psychologists
A fidget of choirboys
A mass of priests
A sulk of teenagers
A whored of prostitutes
A crash of software
A depression of weather forecasts
An exces's of apostrophes
A muckingfuddle of spoonerisms.
David Crystal, ‘By Hook or by Crook’, pp. 189-190.