'a lively communal imagination'

Trying to gather the rest of my thoughts.

Heschel is quite astounding. There is a great primer on Speaking of Faith here. And Jim Gordon has some great reflections here.

And Joann Sfar's movie finally is released in [part of] the English speaking world. There is a a fantastic Guardian interview here. Definitely worth a listen.
And here's the trailer:


And just to mix it up a bit more. Thinking about part of what I was trying to say in my Wikileaks cartoon (and returning to what I was thinking about when I drew my very first post) I was stuck solidly by this, from the introduction to the 2001 edition of Walter Bruegemann's The Prophetic Imagination:

"Cavanagh then concludes in a reflection on [Imagining Argentina]:

To refer to torture as the ‘imagination of the state’ as I have done is obviously not to deny the reality of torture, but to call attention to the fact that torture is part of a drama of inscribing bodies to perform certain roles in the imaginative project which is the nation-state. Likewise, in Imagining Argentina, Carlos's imagination is manifested in real effects: escaping the imagination of the state means that bodies go free. The imagination is defined as nothing less than "the magnificent cause of being". Thornton's novel provides us with a glimpse of what it means to make the odd claim that the Eucharist is the key to Christian resistance to torture. To participate in the Eucharist is to live inside God's imagination. It is to be caught up in what is really real, the body of Christ. As human persons, body and soul incorporated into the performance of Christ's corpus verum, they resist the state's ability to define what is real through the mechanism of torture...

...It may be, however, that torture and consumer satiation perform the same negative function: to deny a lively communal imagination that resists a mindless humanity of despairing conformity...Numbness does not hurt like torture, but in a quite parallel way, numbness robs us of our capability for humanity." (pp. xix-xx)

more of the same

spaced

To keep myself from going a bit mad I watched a whole season of Spaced.

In deliberate contrast to the last post, here is my favourite episode.

'the true nature of the war'

Hauerwas speaks here.
The Guardian guide to the war logs is here.

not a haiku

just handed to me
a sign that I want to grow
'Still warm from the sun'

summer heat and the way I think

For the most part I have decided not to write too much on this here blog. I think, for the most part, that this is because I feel that I would need to write any text that I intend to post while I am online in the blog server. It is a rule that I have made for myself. It does not make much sense. (Especially when you consider that I do not draw online. All my drawings live on paper before I post them here. Some of them, as in the first panel of this strip, exist at least twice before the are posted once). I have lots of rules like this. Most of them do not make sense.

There are a lot of bloggers who write impressive swathes of text. I love the ones I love dearly and can spend long stretches of time reading their posts and reflecting on and being informed by their thoughts and the way that they think. Just for right now, see especially pip wilson, and peer pressure is forever (which I have been reading for a long time), and left of narnia (which is newer to me). These beautiful people have a way of posting their own thoughts and reflections and influences and loves in a way that draws me in and lets me share in what they are thinking about, reflecting on, being influenced by and loving. In some small way, I try to do the same here. But I rarely have the words. So I make elliptical references to films and poems and blogs and people. I draw. In case it is not obvious, this all self-revealing and it is all (intentional and unintentional) my theology.

Anything I do write here is first draft stuff (see Anne Lamott). I want to try and make the connections a bit clearer. We'll see how it goes.

an enormous yes

A great film - war is stupid. Shock and then delight to see Katrin Cartlidge there. She was always wonderful. I saw her in 2001, performing in Boy Gets Girl at the Royal Court in London. Bought the play at the same time for reasons undisclosed.

From an e-mail to a friend yesterday
"...I love this juxtaposition from late in the book (Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Traveled, which I hold dearly):
On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.
P. Larkin
I reckon an enormous yes beats seven kinds of crap out of an enormous no.
S. Fry
I have been trying to say yes to things all this week..."

challenging

Who or what will kick me out of this rut?

Gormleys/Gormlies

Cheered every time I see the Gormleys here in the city.

fruit haiku

Summer tomatoes
harvested from our garden
on the fire-escape