Religion and the Arts最新文献

Gerwig’s Barbie film addresses social concerns regarding sexism and responds to interpretations of Genesis and the roles of men and women. The film argues that women should not rely on or find fulfilment with a man. However, while Ken and Barbie each forge their own paths at the film’s end, the real world continues to suffer from underground patriarchy and Barbie Land resumes functioning like a matriarchy. Gerwig draws attention to the social reform needed for true gender equality to exist, yet the film’s ending shows a distancing from the problem rather than a leaning into it. The Genesis account is often rejected because it is incorrectly interpreted as a patriarchal structure of man’s dominion over women; however, when viewed as an example of an egalitarian relationship, it offers positive visions for society. This requires resisting a narrative of hyper-individualism to right social wrongs and instead adopting a posture of egalitarian goodwill that bolsters the common good.

This article explores José Val del Omar’s religious thought in relation to his Fire in Castile, a 1960 experimental film that sets Spanish Renaissance sculptures in motion by use of pulsating lights, projected patterns, and other striking audiovisual effects. Val del Omar sought to provoke a new and technological mystical encounter: Fire in Castile displaces the viewers’ physical space to create a transcendental and sacred opening, in turn activating the affective role of the sculptures. This essay seeks to contextualize the film in relation to a core theological notion in Val del Omar’s thought, the interlacing of God and time: “God is Time,” he wrote, “the devil rules over space.” For Val del Omar, this is a tragic situation in which God is waiting for us in the entrails of life, which in turn demands a visceral disruption of our spatiotemporal and existential assumptions.

The essay presents a comparative analysis of three modernist novellas—Heart of Darkness, Death in Venice, and The Turn of the Screw—focusing on their use of Dionysian motifs, whereby “Dionysian” is intended in its Nietzschean context. Alongside the thematic literary connections it draws, the essay also reflects on the motives and implications of Nietzsche’s Dionysism for modernist aesthetics: Nietzsche’s eventual subsumption of the Apollonian under the Dionysian ushers in modernity’s espousal of irrationality, disease, darkness, and concealment as its privileged moments of expression. However, this new Dionysism is also symptomatic of the anxiety experienced in the aftermath of the death of God (and the concomitant death of the soul), and the essay demonstrates that the figure of the irrational in all three novellas is conveyed in terms of the struggle of a soul.

The Psalmic is less tidy and linear than popular interpretation, and author Edwidge Danticat explores the non-linear tensions between lament and joy. Her writing is cyclical rather than linear. As Danticat explores the individual and communal juxtaposition of tragedy and celebration, her writing echoes the varied tenor and emotions of the Psalms. Haunting tales of national and personal life and death, separation and reunion are structurally played across her works. The heartrending sequence of life and death is eloquently explored through personal stories set against larger tales of Haitian immigration. Just as the Psalmist employs the vav adversative, or turning movements of joy and lament, Danticat likewise expresses her fluid engagement with the range of human experience (Card 75, 70). Danticat’s Psalmic aesthetic and her “fully awake and alive” wrestling with grief and celebration helps readers reconsider personal and national tragedy and triumph.

This article addresses the lacuna of scholarship on Jewish-American stained glass by presenting a historical overview of this prevalent synagogue art form (1845 to the present). Analysis of key trends reveals Jewish congregations’ engagement with Christian influences by imitating the work of church stained glass in some ways while differentiating in other ways. Jewish artists and congregational leaders have also been in conversation with each other, sharing thematic and design ideas to formulate a loosely shared aesthetic and religious approach towards creating windows for their houses of worship. In accordance with the Second Commandment’s prohibition against creating “graven images,” God in figural form does not appear in synagogue space. Instead, a Jewish technique for eliciting a sense of Divine in the sanctuary has included a repertoire of light-filled images—including torches, lamps, fire, and celestial bodies—to convey a spiritual presence, enhanced by actual light from the sun itself as refracted through the windows.

As initially published by Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) in 1909, his book 777 contained tables of correspondences between the Tarot, qabalistic Tree of Life, divine pantheons and other aspects of Western esotericism. Unsatisfied with the original edition, in 1925 he commissioned artist Oskar Hopfer (1892–1966) to produce diagrams to illustrate the correspondences contained in the tables. Unfortunately, no publisher was found to issue the revised work, and the project went unfulfilled. Hopfer’s original work for Crowley is no longer extant. His designs were considered lost until the recent discovery of set of the diagrams in a German museum. This discovery has shed light on Crowley’s plans for the revised edition of 777, his attempts to publish the work, and his belief in the power of the visual arts to communicate complex esoteric principles.

Oscar Wilde and Paul Cadmus both utilize their art to renegotiate how we imagine our relationship to sin within Catholicism. This article draws attention to resonances between their approaches by presenting a Wildean queer theological aesthetic as a framework to interpret Cadmus’s art. A Wildean framework utilizes the excesses of both Catholicism and queerness as a foil for each other to create pauses for the imagination in a culture and religious tradition that risks falling into mechanization. In the space of that excess, we are allowed to escape the trap of existence to live as Individuals, claiming sin as an excess that offers an imaginative pause out of mere existence. Applied to Cadmus, a Wildean framework focuses on how Cadmus’s works also engages queer and Catholic excess to renegotiate Catholic guilt around the body and instead see the body and its sin as a site to know the Self.

Scholars have often struggled to define the boundaries between sublime and religious experiences, but research tends to agree that sublimity is rational while religious experience is non-rational. However, this view receives a challenge from key texts in science fiction. In the texts I examine, contrary to prevailing views, sublimity turns mystical, while new religions become rational. Furthermore, religion and sublimity relate uneasily, as opposite poles that are distinct from but necessary to one another, with different texts emphasizing one while marginalizing, but not erasing, the other. I explore four authors, two of whom—Arthur C. Clarke and Liu Cixin—emphasize sublimity while relegating religion, while the other two—Robert A. Heinlein and Octavia E. Butler—focus on a fictional religion while subordinating the sublime. Taken together, these texts reveal the ambivalent interdependence of rational and non-rational states of mind in ways that could promote better understanding between religious and non-religious perspectives.

This article offers an historical reexamination of the triangular relationship between the occultist and poet Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), the scholar and art historian Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (Āṉanta Kumāracuvāmi, 1877–1947), and the artist and singer Ratan Devī Coomaraswamy (or “Ratan Devi,” alias Alice Ethel Richardson, 1889–1958). The article first covers each angle of their relationships, with special attention to their approach towards religious art and especially Śaiva (an)iconography where relevant. It then treats a heated, racially charged exchange that the disintegration of this love triangle evoked, and considers how a Thelema-specific idea of “phallic worship” can be found at the neglected margins of Indological art history. The main argument of the article is to show that understanding intimate relationships both within and outside of conventional gender binaries or orientations in twentieth-century worlds of art history can help reveal tension points that endure even in fields not immediately related to a given movement, in this case the Thelemic current. The article accordingly seeks to provide new information about this specific triangular relationship and its relevance to scholars working on various branches of esotericism and its intersection with yoga, Tantra, and South Asia more broadly.

This article discusses the British occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) as an advertiser of the occult. Relying on theories of advertising and branding, it is argued that Crowley’s main branding strategy was the use of irony and humor in order to distance himself from other actors on the occult market. Furthermore, it is argued that this can be understood as a strategy of legitimization rooted in class consciousness, and more specifically in the elite intellectualism of turn-of-the-century Oxbridge. Crowley’s brand identity as the Great Beast 666, the Prophet of a New Age or Aeon, is analyzed with a special focus on his branding strategies in advertising, divided into (1) advertisements in books, (2) prospectuses, (3) marketing campaigns, and (4) the marketing of Crowley as a spiritual teacher.