If Pain Persists: Linde Ivimey Sculpture

Linde Ivimey's exhibition is amazing. The sculptures are made of different bones. During the gallery tour I felt a lot of impressions and especially the sculpture "The Thumper" spark different thoughts off. The sculpture with the butterfly symbolized for me innocent and peace. The poem of Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg came into my mind.

Butterflies 

by Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg

Who hears butterflies laughing; this one knows how clouds are taste.

This one will explore the night in moonshine without fear.

…this one, who becomes a plant, if he wants. To an animal, to a fool, to a philosopher.

And he can travel through the world in one hour.

… this one, who knows, that he nothing knows, how everybody else also nothing knows,

Only he knows, what the others, and he has to learn.

… this one, who feels themselves in foreign bank and has the courage to stretch themselves;

This one will gradually explore itself, without fear.

Down to the tops of himself he looks up.

He takes the fight with his underworld on left.

… this one, who is in peace with himself, will die in peace

And is even more alive than any of his heirs.

The Thumper

Reference:

The Thumper: http://www.artmuseum.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=177757.

 

Do You Believe in Rock and Roll? Musical Cults of the Sacred Popular

"Traditional religions are thus much like vinyl recordings, being replaced by new technologies“ (Till 2010, 186). Traditional religions are in decrease because young people found their own places of worship within music culture. This pop cults become an important place for belief and identity. For example popular music plays a major role at virtualized moments in people’s lives like at weddings or funerals. But the traditional church hold on hymn of Victorian religious practise. Because of this New Religious Movements (NRM) have arised through the pop cults due to the fact that they get in touch with youth people. This "cult is based on practises rather than beliefs“ (172) and a result of the culture changing.

Fowler describes in his book Stages of Faith (1981) six stages. The first stage is a naive and immature fashion. The next two stages including the pop cult, on the one hand the teen pop cult, which is an uncontrolled uncritical belief and on the other hand the synthetic- conventional faith. There is also the individuative-reflective stage, in this station is a mid-life crise anchored. But pop cults could be a bridge or an escape of this crises.

According to Till the religious tradition cannot fit tot he contemporary culture and for that reason a pop cult arises.  For young people it is soften a sign of rebellion and an attempted escape of the reality. During the time several pop cults come into being for example pop drug cults, pop death cults, virtual cults and local cults. A consequence of this development is the decline of communicating and interactivity.

Music is the key element of popular culture and with this element they have an enormous power like on charity festivals. At the same moment it is associated with religion. Pop cults are religions. “Saints and religious figures have been replaced in pop cults by pop stars“ (184). Popular music become to a social force because traditional religions couldn’t help their members anymore. But religion is still a social technology, which "has lost conncetion with the culture of contemporary society“ (178).

Reference:

Till, R. 2010. Pop Cult: Religion and Popular Music. London: Continuum International Publishing, Ch. 9, Do You Believe in Rock and Roll. Musical Cults of the Sacred Popular. 168-192 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9BNoNFKCBI 

Cinemativ Christ- Figures: Holy Ohter or Wholly inadequate?

Everybody knows movies like The Passion of the Christ (2004), where an obvious Christ- figure is included, but there are also movies that also contain Christ-figures, which you can't see on the first glance like Spider-Man (2002) and Braveheart (1996).
 According to Kozlovic these figures include twenty-five character properties.  Dr. Christopher Deacy judges this approach as uncritical because what happens, when one Christ-figure doesn't include all twenty-five properties? Kozlovic didn't answer this question in his article "The Structural Characteristics of the Cinemativ Christ-figure". In addition to the first question Deacy advert to the problem: What would be done, if several Christ-figures appeared in the movie?
As laid down in Deacys article, it could be possible that biblical parallels emerge, but there is a variety of interpretations. For this reason not every hero have to be a Christ-figure, it would be an overenthusiastiv view as Robert Johnston points it out too.

Dr. Christopher Deacy

Deacy refers in his article "Reflections on the Uncritical Appropriation of Cinematic Christ- Figures: Holy Other or Wholly Inadequate?", that the theologians shouldn't try to find paralles between movie-figures and Christ-figures, but instead the movie should be seen as a dialogue partner of the theology. Because sometimes pictures could be useful to understand theological contents and also it is not necessary to use obvious religious issues in a movie to use it for a religious interpretation.
According to Deacy there are not only the one or the other side to interpretate movie- figures like Kozlovic point it out, but there are several ways to interpretate them.



Reference:
Deacy C. 2006. Reflections on the Uncritical Appropriation of Cinematic Christ-Figures: Holy Other or Wholly Inadequate? Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 13, Summer.
Kozlovic, Anton Karl. Fall 2004. “The Structural Characteristics of the Cinematic Christ-figure.” In Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 8. 
http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/thrs/staff/deacy.html
 

"The Mediatization of Religion"- Hjarvard

Stig Hjarvard

“The media as cultural institutions become prominent producers of various religious imaginations“(Hjarvard, 2008: 18).
This qoute from Hjarvard clearly shows the influence of the media on our current life and that the media act as agents of religious change. According to Hjarvard the mediatization is a new main source of religious ideas, where the social functions of institutional religion are taken over by the media, like the sense of community, moral and spiritual guidance.This happened through the development that the media have become an independent institution in society.

But the media is also the “main purveyor of enchanted experiences“ (17) which means a re-enchantment of modern world and it makes us familiar with supernatural themes you have only to think about Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.
But in fact the media uses elements from religious traditions for their own use, while they change the religious message. Hjarvard calls this fact a “banal religion“. 

The media have always an unconscious influence when it comes to religious and political themes. Because of that the article is pretty important for the unterstanding of the context of religion and media. In our temporary world we are often confronted with this matter for example in the advertising. For this reason we should critically ask affairs from time to time.

Red Bull advertising:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOVeSlE5ZFo

Reference:
Hjarvard S. 2008. The Mediatization of Religion: A Theory of the Media as Agents of Religious Change. Northern Lights. 6(1).
http://mef.ku.dk/ansatte/beskrivelse/?id=87296